M2M industry booms as companies and consumers demand more real time data. With the industry growing at a rate of billions of dollars, the satellite industry is eager to gain a slice of the pie.

Monitoring pipelines that are miles away,  checking construction equipment in remote areas for potential mechanical problems, even tracking the behavior of truck drivers when behind the wheel. These capabilities were barely possible a decade ago but are becoming commonplace in nearly every industry from transportation to oil and gas.

The reason is machine-to-machine (M2M), an industry that has been booming over recent years. Its products independently communicate data over a wireless network to a central device, enabling companies to monitor, manage and control assets. Industry experts point to several reasons for its soaring growth: technology innovations that are lowering high-tech costs; rising awareness that such products exist and are affordable; and the need for companies to remain globally competitive by running more efficient operations.

Ramping Up
M2M applications help companies address many issues, says Patrick Shay, executive vice president, sales and marketing, at Orbcomm, which offers the following services:

• Global theft: Organizations who ship products around the world often experience problems with theft, Shay says. Consider the U.S. government, one of Orbcomm’s biggest customers that ships and hauls diesel fuel throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan. “As fuel goes from point A to point B, we have technology that monitors it,” he says, adding that people also tamper with fuel by diluting it.
• Service repairs: Companies can evaluate how heavy equipment is operating in remote areas. Technicians can identify the cause and bring the right parts when sent around the globe to fix it.
• Container tracking: Companies need to know where their containers are at all times. Have they been delivered or are they sitting idle on a dock? By knowing their location, containers can be picked up quicker and deployed faster.
• Cold Chain monitoring: When shipping climate-sensitive products like ice cream or pharmaceuticals, companies can monitor their temperature. If too warm, is the ice cream melting en route? Or are the pills in danger of losing their potency? Companies can then take proactive steps before it’s too late.

M2M products have also found their way into industries such as forestry and oil and gas, adds Sam Fasullo, product manager, satellite division, at Norsat International Inc.

Consider lumber mills. Fasullo says M2M systems are used to measure the particulate matter in the air in real time to operate within air ambient quality guidelines.

In oil and gas, M2M solutions monitor H2S and SO2 gases via satellite during flaring operations on mountaintops. “You want to operate within your flare permit,” says Fasullo, explaining that permits dictate when you can flare and also where your equipment needs to be placed to monitor these dangerous gases.

M2M also can assist companies monitor the levels of their petroleum, liquid gas or natural gas tanks to help plan collection routes.

There’s even a M2M application that’s referred to as a driver behavior mentoring system, adds David Wigglesworth, VP, M2M data services at Iridium. It was developed by Inthinc, he says, and it monitors how a fleet vehicle is being driven. It alerts drivers about local speed limits, using in-cab audio to tell them to slow down if they are driving too fast or simply breaking too hard, for example. Other features include seat belt usage and hours of service compliance recording.

The driver data that is collected in the vehicle is sent via Iridium’s global satellite network to an analysis system where information from the vehicle fleet and its drivers can be reviewed for safety and operational efficiencies. For example, drivers that have the most speeding or hard breaking events can be targeted for additional training. The solution can be used to determine many other useful fleet metrics from who is the most fuel efficient to the overall accident rate per million miles driven.

“Some off-road locations are very rugged and vehicle life spans can be short, like 50,000 miles because the gravel roads they travel on are so bad,” Wigglesworth says. “Using a solution to monitor and manage vehicle usage can help get an extra 10,000 miles out of a vehicle before it becomes unserviceable. That’s one-fifth of its life span added on. That’s how M2M can save money.” And lives. Countries in Asia have also deployed sensors above and below ground in remote areas to monitor patterns or shifts in the Earth’s movement. Likewise, sensors have also been placed on buoys in the ocean to monitor waves, says Khalid Mahmood, senior network architect, Hughes Europe. He explains that the extracted data is brought back to Hughes’ terminals located in the vicinity, and is then backhauled over satellite to the company’s head office or data center.

Hot Market, Cool Products
The $121 billion M2M industry is projected to maintain a 23 percent annual growth rates over the next decade, soaring to $948 billion by 2020, according to a Feb. 2013 report published by The Carbon War Room. By 2020, the report states that there will be 12.5 billion M2M devices globally, up from 1.3 billion devices today. Most will be in China, according to the report, which is incorporating M2M into its infrastructure.

Shay says his company’s current strategy involves growing its overall M2M business, partly through acquisitions. Within the past several months, it purchased GlobalTrak and MobileNet to expand its distribution channels and product offering.

GlobalTrak, for instance, expanded Orbcomm’s presence in the government space throughout the Middle East, Asia, and South America. With MobileNet, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), dealers and fleet owners can receive diagnostic data to schedule service repairs, identify potential problems with parts, and be proactive before product warranties expire.

To augment its global footprint, the company also partners with Tier One wireless carriers to provide cellular coverage where they do business around the world. In turn, the carriers are able to market Orbcomm’s end-to-end vertical solutions to their customers.

Overall, Shay says M2M products have gotten “very cool” in the last two years. Consider Orbcomm’s new products. The GT1100, which contains a solar panel and rechargeable battery, fits on top of a container for tracking purposes. It doesn’t require external power and can go weeks without the sun while sending daily status reports. Another Orbcomm product, the OG2-M satellite modem, is smaller than a deck of cards. It includes GPS and an accelerometer, which allows the modem to “know” when to wake up when the satellite is overhead to send or receive messages, then go back to sleep.

Norsat’s latest M2M offering – Sentinel RMC (Remote site Monitoring and Control) – is a completely managed, end-to-end solution. It’s a data as well as a service platform providing real-time data monitoring and control, says Fasullo.

It has the ability to analyze data so that it only sends what is needed or required, making data transfer more efficient, he explains.

Hurdles and Gaps
Despite the industry’s rapid growth, there are still many obstacles. The adoption of any new M2M solution is driven by its value proposition, explains Wigglesworth. Although many M2M solutions go through customer trials, he says the million-dollar question is if they can be integrated into a customer’s core business or internal systems.

“There are a lot of pieces that can complicate the integration,” he says. “Customers want everything delivered turnkey, plugged into their enterprise systems. That’s sometimes challenging. However, Iridium enables M2M solutions to be deployed globally even in the most remote locations and that enables companies to deploy a single network for their fleet wherever they may be deployed and that delivers the true promise and return-on-investment of M2M.”

Developing connectivity standards is also a challenge, according to Dan Poirier, SVP, operations, at SkyWave Mobile Communications, which launched IsatData Pro in 2011, a low data rate tracking, monitoring and messaging service that delivers messages of up to 10,000 bytes to the device and up to 6,400 bytes from the device.

As the industry evolves, he expects standard requirements for communication to be developed, ultimately become ubiquitous, and help drive down the engineering costs of connecting particular devices. “Ultimately, it’s the adoption of industry standards that will ensure devices are plug and play… the more standards utilized and barriers crossed, the more total cost of ownership will drop,” Poirier says.

To lower costs even further, Mahmood hopes that M2M applications will soon move across different frequency bands like Ka and Ku. Then, terminals will become more cost effective from a hardware and satellite perspective because they can work at any frequency. Until then, he says, the satellite industry will continue facing tough competition from providers offering lower cost technologies like cellular.