Hindsight might be said to be 20/20, but leading Swedish mobile company Ericsson (News - Alert) is looking toward the future with its plan to connect 50 million M2M (Machine-to-Machine) devices by the year 2020.

Ericsson is teaming up with Swisscom (News - Alert) to develop the technology. As the name suggests, M2M allows devices to communicate over wireless and wired networks the way humans can. An M2M device sends an event from a sensor over a network to another device. The event can be something like a temperature change or the inventory of a particular product in a store. The receiving device can be located in a local network or across the Internet.

Anders Runevad, Head of Region Western & Central Europe, Ericsson, said, "We have built out our leading position as an M2M solution provider to operators worldwide and now we are partnering with Swisscom in one of the world's first large-scale M2M market introductions. We have connected billions of people to date with mobile networks. Now we are starting to address the Networked Society with our vision of more than 50 billion connected devices -- primarily from M2M connectivity in all kinds of industries -- by 2020 worldwide."

"We are entering this partnership -- in which Ericsson supports us not only with its M2M connectivity platform, but also with its extensive experience of the worldwide M2M market -- with the clear ambition not only to be first in an emerging market, but also to provide our customers with the kind of superior offering they are used to from us. Our ambition is to provide enterprise customers with a scalable, easy-to-configure-and-maintain, telecom-grade solution that helps them to leverage the full potential of their M2M connectivity and gain a competitive advantage,” Urs Schaeppi, Head of Swisscom’s Corporate Business Unit, said.

This is not the only forward-looking move the company is making. Ericsson’s president and CEO said that with 50 billion different devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2020, the only way for them to be compatible with each other was to use the still-developing HTML5 standard.

The company is also dealing with a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court brought by Airvana (News - Alert), who says the company misappropriated proprietary technology of theirs.