What 4G Means To M2M

This article by Taylor White, online brand specialist at Wilson Electronics discusses the effects that 4G may have on machine to machine (M2M) enabled machines and consumer devices. Though still in its infancy M2M is quickly evolving to be an everyday part of every aspect of our life, and will likely continue to grow at an exponential pace.

Most M2M networks, however, only run off 2G speeds and many think that 2G networks will be sufficient for M2M going forward at the moment. Overall M2M doesn’t have a high rate of data transmission, so the speed of the network is not something hindering a lot of M2M communication.

In an article by Tom Inglesby for Connected World Magazine he quotes Mark RItorto of Harbor Research as saying, “You might expect a few megabytes a month from something like a substation monitor or automation system, they just aren’t high data rates. If you’re just checking on the status of an asset every so often then generally it’s a couple of kilobytes here and there. We found there to be a few potential areas that 4G technologies would be better at addressing for M2M than the current 2G and 3G networks.”