The internet of things and machine to machine learning and communication, are two of the biggest growth industries at the moment and they’re paving the way for all sorts of background automation that will make life immeasurably easier – before it puts us all out of work. Still before that inevitably depressing future, we can look to the telematics market to take a monstrous bite of the industry each year, as it’s driving the growth of the M2M market and accounting for the bulk of its revenue year on year.
This is according to a recent study of the M2M industry by Juniper Research, which which suggests that it may be worth up to $40 billion around the world by 2019, with teleamtics making up a massive part of that. In-fact, by then it predicts that one in five cars will have a little black box device of some kind in them – whether it’s bespoke hardware of a smartphone app.
It won’t just be dominating in terms of revenue though, but with regards to bandwidth as well. With the near constant broadcasting of location and speed data, it’s some of the most intensive M2M communications of any industry. The fact that those messages can sometimes go two ways too, with some devices requesting data on traffic or other cloud based information, or fleet managers sending data to a driver, it makes them doubly intensive.
This isn’t expected to lessen in the next few years either, as when the eCall system is implemented, every new car will have some measure of telematics on board, which may put stress on remote areas which are only covered by 3G data. This will be even more pronounced in less developed countries with large populations like China, which has recently pushed for automation and telematics to try and help combat its ever growing congestion problem in big cities.
“Both India and China are expected to see rapid adoption of smart metering as new metering infrastructure is installed and smart cities are created,” said Anthony Cox, Juniper Research analyst (via ItWeb).
He also touched on the fact that it may not just be cities that begin adopting telematics technology. There are already glimpses of the future in how the tracking technology can be applied to farming and other rural industries in order to improve productivity and efficiency, which can have a huge impact on a farm’s revenues. It’s in those areas, where data coverage is not so impressive, that issues with bandwidth could be the most obvious.
