T-Mobile USA, Inc. announced on Thursday the first-of-its-kind embedded SIM for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) solutions. The new durable embedded SIM is not larger than the head of a pin, yet it is able to withstand harsh environmental factors like temperature, humidity and motion while providing reliable wireless connectivity. According to the company, the card can prove ideal for telematics and smart grid infrastructure solutions that can be affected by environmental factors, while also reducing maintenance costs.

Many of the benefits that a GSM-based SIM card offers can be found in the embedded SIM solution, including authentication, encryption and storage, but in a much smaller size than traditional cards that can be found in a mobile phone. At the same time, it is entirely built from silicon, and not plastic like traditional solutions, and has been developed so as to be hard-mounted onto M2M modules, which can accelerate deployment, as there is no need to manually insert a SIM card. All the features of the new embedded card are meant to allow equipment and solution providers to work with T-Mobile for delivering to the market smaller and more durable, as well as cost-effective M2M solutions.

“T-Mobile’s embedded SIM solution drives efficiencies, speeds time to market, and extends the life of M2M solutions even in the toughest environments,” said John Horn, national director of M2M, T-Mobile USA. “With our simple, streamlined certification process, we expect partners to have commercial solutions based on this new technology running on the T-Mobile network as soon as this summer.”

One of the first companies to use the new T-Mobile solution into their M2M systems is Echelon Corp, as the two announced an alliance meant to speed up the adoption of the smart grid in the US through the reduction of costs of communicating smart meters while making use of T-Mobile’s GSM cellular service and Echelon’s Networked Energy Services (NES) system. The launch of the embedded SIM card is meant to accelerate the adoption of M2M into industries that can highly benefit from it, such as healthcare, agriculture, fleet management, automotive, energy, manufacturing and vending.

“M2M services are experiencing impressive growth, and we’ve predicted that the US enterprise M2M cellular service market will reach nearly 20 million connections by 2012,” said Steve Hilton, vice president of Yankee Group’s Anywhere Enterprise research group. “According to recent Yankee Group research, speeding time to market and simplifying the sales process by compressing the supply chain is critical. T-Mobile’s embedded SIM offering further accelerates the M2M market opportunity.”

T-Mobile USA also announced strong year-over-year growth in M2M connections in the past six years since it started the business unit. The company's GSM network can offer the infrastructure for always-connected services meant to offer companies solutions to reduce operating costs or to streamline regular data collection tasks while registering business efficiency.