Page 92 - Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016

Box 3.2: China’s large-scale M2M deployment
China is the world’s largest M2M market, with some 50 million connections by 2014. China
Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom are all developing large M2M businesses. They have
support from the Chinese government, which has identified IoT as an “emerging strategic
industry” and is investing USD 603 billion in the M2M ecosystem in the decade leading up to
2020.

The energy (including smart grid) and transportation (including freight tracking) sectors have
been early adopters, with increasing demand in the automotive, smart city, healthcare, education
and retail sectors. China Unicom connects BMW cars to the BMW ConnectedDrive service,
providing embedded SIMs and hosting call and data centres. China Telecom’s Mega Eye business
supports 800,000 video cameras in 20 different industry sectors. The growth of 4G networks will
further support applications such as video surveillance and in-car multimedia services.

Hundreds of Chinese cities are deploying smart-city technologies. These include intelligent
traffic management systems that adjust signals to ease congestion and help drivers find parking
spaces, as well as systems to monitor pollution and noise sources. Mobile healthcare and
education services are being developed to reach patients and schools in remote areas. And there
are enhanced emergency-response and home health-monitoring applications, with Unicom
developing smart ambulances that can send patients’ data ahead to the destination hospital.
China Mobile has developed M2M applications to help farmers remotely manage greenhouses
and irrigation systems and to assist forest managers in monitoring fire hazards.

Source: GSMA, How China is set for global M2M Leadership, June 2014.

allowing them to compare prices and reviews • smart power and water grids – which will
among different products and stores. provide similar improvements, efficiencies and
cost reductions for key utility infrastructures.
Customers also can access discounts and
advertisements tailored to their known Closer to the individual, “connected vehicles” with
preferences or demographics. Interestingly, some hundreds of separate sensors will be safer, more
of the information gathered may be on-scene, reliable, and able to participate in sophisticated
using camera image analysis and signals from congestion-management systems. Health and
wireless devices such as smart phones. The use of social services, which increasingly challenge
such data gathered about individuals, of course, governments around the world as populations
raises significant questions about privacy, as grow older, could be significantly enhanced with
discussed below. IoT-based systems used by individuals, care-givers,
primary care doctors and hospitals.
Figure 3.4 and Table 3.1 show the areas where
IoT usage is currently receiving the most attention
from key ICT stakeholders, identifying possible 3.4 Challenges and opportunities
future developments. At the macro level, two
of the areas of greatest IoT development and Governments and the private sector are continuing
investment are: to fund significant levels of IoT research and
development in areas such as modularity,
• smart cities – where infrastructure and reliability, flexibility, robustness and scalability .
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building systems will improve the efficiency But the basic capabilities needed for many
and sustainability of a whole range of urban applications are already well understood and are
activities; and becoming available through smart phones and
other standard platforms . These devices will also
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defuse some of the cost issues that have held back

74 Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016