It’s amazing sometimes how myopic we can all be. Our last session at the 4GWE Conference in Miami was scary as all get out. Anton Wahlman pointed out that the move to 4G/LTE (News - Alert) was full of pitfalls that made the choice of carriers more like a marriage than a date. 

That made me realize that the 3G system is going to stay in place particularly for M2M. I particularly think that way about GSM and the benefit that it represents to everywhere but here (the U.S.). In a piece on the Future of Communication newsletter Martin Geddes wrote:

"We come to celebrate GSM…In a mere two decades GSM has created a connected planetary populace. The spread and impact of even the printing press cannot compare. The core offer is a perfect packaging of human voice and simple text into GSM’s mobile telephony and SMS standards. …This achievement cannot be understated, and should not be diminished. Too many Web-heads dismiss the benefits that GSM has brought. It wasn’t the Internet that connected billions, it was GSM….

Whilst the marketing people would like us to treat UMTS (aka 3G) and LTE (aka 4G) as something different from GSM, these are really just iterations of the same basic pattern of voice, messaging and data, delivered by broadly the same players. Whilst there is lots of good work on radio standards and interoperability going on via the GSMA (News - Alert) and 3GPP standards bodies, it is the ecosystem as a whole that is under threat."

I recommend reading the Future of Communication Newsletter since it’s clearly an insight into the perils facing GSM’s migration. The carriers desire to break out into differentiated services is being undermined by their internal management problems. Or more specifically, over the top is innovating to something superior to the technology the carriers are chasing.

For M2M this is critical because a lot of the deployments are global. Some people have predicted that 4G will be the shortest lived upgrade in history, while some friends are telling me that WiFi (News - Alert) will become the 5G of our future. 

Ironically, the effort to differentiate between each other just adds to the use of the carrier’s network as a dumb pipe.

In the last few weeks ETSI (News - Alert) has announced efforts amongst the standards bodies to get its M2M act together. It may be that we see a strategy that makes the value of carrier services clearer.

When it comes to M2M, people represent two horizontals in telecom and IT that are making it possible to provide an API to various verticals. As the carriers woo the platform folks it will be interesting to see if they can deliver solutions that differentiate services. If not we could see M2M slamming like we saw with cellular in the 90s.

Bottom line is the platforms have the benefit of all the economies of scale that IT and wireless now have. But the key benefit they bring is that they support universal service better than the carriers.

And that strikes me as ironic, but I have hope.