Recently, I was looking at some marketing materials that predicted two million SIM cards this year for Machine to Machine applications.

In my recent past I was looking at all the issues with SIM cards and penetration testing. SIM cards have solved a lot of problems with provisioning and general Triple A services (Authentication, Authorization and Account), but I would never call them a security failsafe.

Another friend is a nut about total cost of ownerships for SIMs is about $4. While for smartphones this is a good number, as you go down to managing sensors, SIM cards look like a lot of cost.

In the age of the Internet, we have RADIUS and DIAMETER. This has made ubiquitous connectivity on the Internet for everything. Provisioning though, has been very much an island.  Companies like iPASS have Boingo have enabled some roaming.

The WiMAX (News - Alert) forum has been working to get to the next step where roaming in the WiMAX world is as seamless as the GSM members. 

For the GSMA community this is still part of the issue that pushes the IPX standardization.

If nothing happens to change the market in the near future, the far horizon where LTE (News - Alert) standards and WiMAX standards unite will be the place where the battle will occur.

Currently, in the M2M do machines talking both strategies does not add or detract from the capability, but going forward SIMS seem redundant to me.

Not today's problem, but certainly part of the evolution for an M2M.