GSMA (or Group Special Mobile) is a European association formed in 1995 and is one of the very few major institutions, responsible for standardization, deployment and promotion of GSM telephony system. The association currently represents the interests of over 800 mobile providers and 200 companies in over 220 countries. Its responsibility and mission is now much broader than the initial definition. With all the new services and advanced technologies, whose widespread adoption and standardization is key to the deployment and commercialization of the innovative services, GSMA has much more to do than just promoting the GSM telephony systems. Its initiatives and activities are now very diverse and include areas from spectrum for mobile broadband to public policy matters such as mYouth, sector regulation and child abuse contents, to mobile payment and transport services. Not surprisingly, IoT is also on this list.
GSMA IoT initiative is titled as “Connected Living” with the vision of enabling a world of IoT, where consumers and businesses enjoy access to rich services, through connection via an intelligent and secure mobile system. This is specifically to ensure operators will have a standardized environment, where all players collaborate in an efficiently-regulated environment, with a network optimized for IoT type of services; these services typically need low to moderate data throughput, and low power in most of the cases. Therefore the two major characteristics of a connected network –for the IoT- should be efficiency and security. In the next level, device management and billing models should be defined. Device management has been important, especially because of some use cases in remote areas, where provisioning, re-provisioning is done via wireless system and not manually. For one instance, M2M was one of the main use cases for embedded SIM several years ago.
Now, I would like to encourage you to think about M2M and the IoT from the perspective of a mobile operator. Without M2M, mobile operator’s potential market is heavily LIMITED TO the population, where each person will require one or may be two mobile devices (plans) in its best case. But M2M and IoT take the market to another level where a wireless operator is not limited by the population, but is offering value added services, and can make money not only through minutes and gigabytes and sometimes bundled plans, but by offering interesting and beneficial services. Think about all different sectors, including health care, manufacturing, retailers, mining, electronic appliances, environment, consumers, and all different targets including children, infants and seniors among many more. So, the opportunity would be enormous for operators who had become just a pipeline for the streaming data, where others were exploiting the value, with no extra or special benefit to mobile operators who just sold the data plans. This is why providers have been closely monitoring, capitalizing and purchasing the IoT startups for the past couple of years, and the wave continues, and should continue for another two to five years.
The M2M an IoT, therefore, could be important to operators, which explains why GSMA, that represents their interest, is now taking the steps, and is working with governments too, to ensure the required regulations and standardized secure environment will be in place for the deployment of consumer-focused and business-focused IoT services to fulfill (as they mark it really well) the ‘socio-economic’ benefits.