Bananas have something to do with future growth prospects for the “machine-to-machine” or “sensor-based” mobile business.

 

Bananas are one of Wal-Mart’s most-profitable items, says Vince Lesch (News - Alert), Tekelec CTO. So one important issue is timing the arrival of bananas to stores when they are just ripe. Text messages sent over the wireless network is how Wal-Mart now works with its distributors to monitor the release of nitrogen, which controls the ripening process.

 

The implications for mobile ecosystem partners are fairly staggering. Billions of people now use mobility services. But there are scores of billions of machines and sensors that might provide more useful service if equipped with communications capabilities.

 

Today retail services are sold to human beings. In the future, many “end users” will be sensor networks and monitoring servers, and the value chain providers that purchase communications to enable those networks.

 

Today, most sales are to end users. In the future a significant number of sales will be to business partners who bundle communications with applications.

 

As an example, consider that machine-to-machine services provider Numerex has selected short message service technology from mobile messaging company Tekelec (News - Alert) and capacity from Sprint.

 

Tekelec’s SMS capabilities will integrate into Numerex’s (News - Alert) M2M message delivery platform serving government, transportation, utility, healthcare and building security customers. Keep in mind that such capabilities imply for signaling volume, databases and devices. “There’s huge interest in supporting up to a billion phone numbers now, by any single carrier,” says Lesch.

 

Machine-to-machine text messages can be sent and received anywhere a basic cellular connection is available, giving Numerex customers global reliability and rapid message delivery. ABI Research (News - Alert) forecasts that M2M SMS will grow at a 40 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2014.

 

“SMS is the most affordable and dependable wireless communication method for both personal and machine-to-machine communications,” says Lesch.