Vodafone has held onto its position as the world’s top telco in Machina Research’s annual machine-to-machine (M2M) report.
"Vodafone has ramped up its already significant efforts in M2M in the last twelve months," said Machina Research CEO Matt Hatton, in an email to Total Telecom. "It has benefited for a while from tremendous scale and a keen strategic focus, but it also keeps engaging in new initiatives to cement its position as market leader."
AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica are also highly-rated by the specialist research firm, which published its latest market review on Thursday.
"There are many elements to defi ning leadership and we believe that a true global strategy, with reach and capabilities, stand among the more important ones," explained Godfrey Chua, principal analyst at Machina Research and lead author of the report, in a statement.
Scale, experience, technology and velocity are also important considerations, he said. "The top tier of global CSPs we have identified demonstrated excellence across all these areas."
Machina Research expects the number of M2M connections worldwide to swell to 27 billion in 2024 from 5 billion at the end of 2014. Over the same period, M2M revenues – which includes revenues from devices, connectivity and applications – are forecast to grow to US$1.2 trillion from $500 billion at the end of 2014.
Vodafone, more than any other operator covered by Thursday’s report, is taking advantage of the M2M opportunity, Machina said.
Hatton cited the U.K.-based telco’s 2014 acquisition of automotive telematics provider Cobra, its investment in customer care, and the licensing of its Global Data Services Platform (GDSP) to other operators as evidence of Vodafone’s M2M prowess.
"And there are lots of interesting initiatives in the works, most notably around low power wide area (LPWA) network deployment," he added.
Vodafone is closely followed by AT&T. Together, the operators lead a group of global telcos that includes Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Orange, Telenor Connexion, Verizon and Softbank/Sprint.
"For multinational corporations requiring seamless, large-scale, and effective global M2M services and solutions, these are the CSPs they should be conversing with," said Chua.
In terms of overall M2M connections though, China Mobile comfortably leads Vodafone and AT&T. China Mobile had 42 million M2M connections at the end of 2014 – it surpassed 50 million earlier this year &ndash ; which is double the number of Vodafone and AT&T.
China Unicom is no slouch either, with more than 10 million M2M connections.
However, Machina said China Mobile and China Unicom are decidedly local in their approaches to the M2M market, which rules them out of being counted alongside players that are addressing the global M2M market.
Meanwhile, as M2M adoption gathers pace, Machina said it will soon become apparent which operators are delivering the best overall M2M customer experience.
"We will be able to observe initial market responses to the new technologies and approaches being proposed," such as low power wide area (LPWA) technology, multiplatform offerings, and global M2M alliances, noted Hatton.
"The next 12 months will be a very interesting time for the industry," he predicted.
