GSMA drives embedded-module takeover

Michael O'Hara

If the goal of the GSM Association comes to fruition, there will be 50 billion connected devices on the market by 2025, meaning that every individual could have approximately seven connected devices. That also means seven new revenue streams coming into the service providers who stake a claim in the movement, which is beginning to reach all industries from healthcare to transport to clean energy, education, consumer electronics and smart utilities. In an effort to drive volumes up and prices down, the GSMA launched a competition last week encouraging the production of standardized 3G modules in a range of consumer electronics devices. GSMA chief marketing officer Michael O’Hara spoke with Telephony about the GSMA’s Embedded Mobile initiative, launched last year, and the potential for service providers to move beyond voice and into devices everywhere.

On the networks’ evolution: When I came in [a year ago], we were focused on the mobile broadband space and the battle between HSPA, LTE and the WiMax camp. That was a valid technology debate a year ago; people were trying to look at what would win; what would be the best way to do mobile broadband going forward. We got to a point where that is pretty much over. We are now sitting around 315 HSPA networks across 127 countries. There are about 133 million HSPA subscribers out there now. It is certainly fast growing and will become the ubiquitous mobile broadband technology going forward. We still see WiMax as complementary in some emerging markets, but as a mainstream technology, we’re pretty much set on HSPA and the evolution into LTE. As that rolls out, we have 3G phones; we’ve seen the emergence of 3G laptops over the next year and operators starting to sell netbooks. The next step is embedding the mobile broadband technology in every device.

On the target verticals: There is definitely the potential to embed the technology in a number of areas. Obviously with consumer electronics where you start to look at connected cameras, MP3 players – all that fun stuff. The utility markets have always been big with smart metering, the ability to charge people differently depending on the time of day. It is interesting around performance information from cars and monitoring how cars are going along, health care, patient monitoring and well-being monitoring. Clean energy is a becoming a big thing around reporting emissions and air quality. Those are a number of verticals where you are starting to see this technology move and probably the target verticals for us.