Mobile telematics to embrace 200 million machines by 2012

Analyst Berg Insight says 186 million machines will be connected to mobile networks by 2012.

According to Berg Insight research, the number of cellular network connections used for machine-to-machine (or telematics) communications will grow from 37.5 million in 2007 to 186 million connections by 2012.

GSM and legacy technologies currently dominate the market and accounted for 71% of the total number of active connections at the end of 2007.

CDMA (3G) was the second largest technology, with a strong foothold in North America and parts of Asia-Pacific. WCDMA - the 3G alternative for Europe and Japan - has so far primarily been adopted for machine-to-machine applications in Japan.

Elsewhere, adoption is held back by high component costs and limited network coverage, said Berg.

The research found that current machine-to-machine applications generally corresponded to between 1% and 3% of the reported number of mobile subscribers in developed markets. In Sweden and Finland the share is closer to 10% due to extensive use of GPRS for meter-reading applications.

Berg Insight forecasts that vehicle telematics applications will dominate the machine-to-machine cellular market in most parts of the world, and account for more than half of all network connections in 2012.

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