Last week I had a conversation with Barclay Knapp and Doreen Trant of M2M Spectrum Networks, whose history in building cellular networks includes the Midwest portion of Cellular One. We started by discussing an opportunity to deliver a parking meter like service to airport garages, and in determining the requirements the two of them began scoping out the pricing model for such a service. The expectation was that on average they would be able to bill customers about $4.00 per month. Unfortunately, though, the best price they could get from the cellular operators for resell was $8.00 per month.
Rather than taking their sensors and going home, though, Knapp and Trant asked themselves why the pricing was so out of sync with the opportunity. Having the background of building networks, their analysis was much deeper than many frustrated M2M implementers.
Knapp and Trant realized that the drive to LTE was based on the consumer requirements for more data/video and faster speeds, and that it had little to do with the requirements of most M2M implementations. The characteristics of many M2M implementations are single path, small bursts of data with very little bandwidth requirements. For this kind of traffic, time division half duplex (do we still use the term “simplex?”) mobile services makes a lot of sense. In fact, in building for this kind of traffic, several problems that LTE faces disappear, such as the requirements for continual division of the frequency into small cells. Without the concern about data traffic congestion forcing the use of small cells, the range of towers is much greater and even can take advantage of repeaters.
While this is not a shared spectrum strategy, M2M Spectrum Networks uses cognitive techniques to move between their licensed spectrum, and this allows M2M Spectrum Networks to hit a price point that the traditional carriers cannot match. It also comes at an opportune time because many of the carriers are turning off their 2G networks, some via announcements and some unannounced. For the 2G implementations the swap out costs to work with M2M Spectrum Networks as opposed to migrating to LTE is significant.
Competitively speaking, this does not mean that the carriers are going to pack it in. What we may be seeing is a further segmentation of traffic and we should recognize that many M2M/IoT implementations can consider the smartphone as an alternative aggregation and application. For many of the brown fields and
industrial Internet solutions, however, the timing is right for M2M Spectrum Networks.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
