Machina Research: M2M's share of roaming doubled in 12 months

A new study from Starhome Mach and Machina Research said mobile network operators should pay more attention to the impact of machine-to-machine (M2M) roaming on their networks as M2M's share of roaming doubled in the last 12 months. Machina Research estimates that there are now 350 million cellular based connections worldwide, and expects this to grow to 1.3 billion over the next five years. However, the company said the proportion of M2M connections accounted for by roaming is growing even faster. It said that while the growth is obviously good news for network operators, there are also hidden pitfalls for the unwary. Roaming M2M devices have different usage profiles from human roamers; some are heavy users of data, but others may send and receive very little while still being heavy consumers of "free" signalling resources on the visited network. Report