According to the Cisco VNI report on mobile growth, the trends in M2M are just part of the overall trend contributing to 4.7 percent in the overall market.

However, the trends seem to indicate anomalies in opportunity. With the growth in video it seems to indicate that surveillance, visual monitoring and telemedicine should be the more heated opportunities for future growth.

Additionally, with the need for WiFi (News - Alert) to offload and the tendency to stay wireless in the home, it suggests that remote patient care and smart home solutions should trend faster.

This helps me answer a question I have been asking myself, “Does the M2M market need 4G technology to evolve?”

I have come away from this query with three ‘yes’ answers.

1)     Yes, because it shows stability. The trend for years in M2M was for wireless to be a solution of last resort. The reason was concern about coverage and network deployments. The embracing of 4G and all the map commercials have shown that fear as being no longer relevant.

2)     Yes, because it is visual. In dealing with the remote locations the need often is for “hands and eyes” to eventually be deployed to support the troubles. The benefit of M2M for Web and video is that systems are becoming more visual. This also trends to retail and marketing M2M solutions such as digital signs; however, even the simplest application can be blended with big data to deliver business intelligence to evaluate the sensors results.

3)     Yes, because there is an app for that. As the user becomes more mobile the integration of M2M to smartphones becomes more appealing. Self -managed alarms bring back the days when we all had beepers receiving alarms from our network. Now M2M can be deployed in ways that make it accessible to everyone.

If you build it they will come. According to the report while 4G represents only 2 percent of the deployments, it represents 6 percent of the data. As the report says “there is anecdotal evidence to support the idea that usage increases when speed increases, although there is often a delay between the increase in speed and the increased usage, which can range from a few months to several years.”

M2M innovation continues to take advantage of the speed and growth. If you have an M2M application that is data intensive (requiring speed and bandwidth), I would love to feature it at our M2M Evolution Conference in Austin. Drop me a line.