I was going to write about VisionSafe’s Emergency Vision Assurance System [EVAS] being deployed by UPS. It’s an airbag that covers the windows and instruments enabling the pilot to look inside it to see clearly when the flight deck is filled with smoke. Its an interesting solution, however, its not connected to a smoke sensor. The pilots choose when to use it by manually deploying it. 

Calling it M2M was too much of a stretch even for me. However, it got me thinking about when a machine qualifies for M2M in its activities. Does a device have to communicate in order to be considered M2M? Does it have to have mobility as one of the Ms?

Reading some of the standards bodies discussion and the continued expectation for synergies in platforms, the question of identification becomes a telling component of whether the solution qualifies for M2M categorization.

We have a lot of devices that are clearly using wireless networks to communicate and if you believe some of the standards, gurus should each have their own unique number. This comes at time when my SIP friends would tell me us we don’t need the numbers for ourselves, so its hard to fathom the reason machines need it. However, in the Achilles heel of telecom lies an E.164 numbering ID.

The question then is, is there a parallel to people and machines? Should we consider Zigbee and RFID addressing as the equivalent to a PBX (News - Alert) with internal and external addressing? Will Carriers be selling DIDs that will be mapped by a gateway into enterprise based solutions? Besides the wireless operators seeing a fertile market should the Station Message Detail Recording [SMDR] business see this as an opportunity to grow?

I would like to see M2M find some standardization on addressing issues based on IPv6 and MAC addressing for Internet routing. Additionally, I would expect to see trust certificates used to manage the complex problem of security. Even with RSA (News - Alert) recently being compromised certificate authorities make sense when looking at managing deployments.

However, it’s far more likely that addressing will be the place where we see e.164 being used. Some of our carrier friends that have large blocks of numbers in remote locations may find this a boom. I could even make a case that Voxbone (News - Alert) should take the 883 country code and deploy for M2M as a strategy. 

However, at the present time like the pilots the choice of numbering seems to be more manual than automatic.