CINGULAR PREPS NET FOR M2M

Cingular Wireless won't let its Mobitex legacy mobile data network ride off into the sunset just yet. The carrier is positioning the network as a home for increasingly popular machine-to-machine applications, according to Tom Langan, vice president of Cingular Interactive.

“We've spent a year putting this strategy together, and we want to become the pre-eminent M2M player,” Langan said from the floor of the M2M Expo event last week in Dallas. Cingular was a sponsor of the event and the only traditional mobile carrier that exhibited.

Analysts have questioned Cingular — most recently at last month's Wireless 2004 trade show — about what the carrier will do with the Mobitex network as more of its customers migrate to its just-completed GPRS network. The Mobitex network has the combination of high availability, low latency and low-cost service that positions it well for M2M, Langan said.

M2M communications address networks of non-human-oriented devices that need to self-monitor, conduct financial transactions and otherwise exchange information with one another. The devices targeted could be as critical as alarms and sensors used for airport security, or as mundane as monitoring systems that make sure hundreds of highway billboards light up at night.

With the expectation for 1.5 trillion such devices worldwide in the next three to six years, the potential market for M2M communications is far larger than the worldwide market for human-oriented mobile communications, according to industry analysts.

“Somewhere around 2007 to 2010, two out of every three cellular calls will be one machine talking to another,” Langan said.

So far, the rate at which Mobitex users are switching to GPRS is less than what the carrier had expected, Langan said. “But the strategy going forward is that more of Mobitex's traffic will be M2M communications.