14 DAY TRIAL // Berg Insight has conducted a new research which has brought them to the conclusion that by the year 2011, there will be 52 million machines using mobile phones connected to worldwide networks.
The study took into consideration the fact that at the end of year 2006 there was an approximate number of 8.5 million cellular and satellite M2M connections, functional in Europe and also in Western Europe. Furthermore, the annual growth of European mobile networks has been of more than 40 percent. As a result, the next four years will bring the number of mobile phones to more than 50 million.
Other predictions regarding the technological evolution in the next years further show that motor vehicles will become the largest segment, with more than 60 percent of the total base. This comes as a result of the fact that energy meters represent the largest market segment when it comes to deployed units. At the moment, they are followed by motor vehicles, security alarms and POS-terminals. By 2011, things are expected to change in favor of motor vehicles.
This is why they consider installing a mobile device in all cars, as a basic emergency standard feature. GPS-aided crash notifications are currently available on a large number of vehicles coming from the North American market. The European Commission noticed how useful such a device can be and proposed that a so called eCall device should be required on all new cars sold in the EU from 2010 as a mandatory emergency system.
Furthermore, Berg Insight has noticed the fact that especially in some world areas, such devices are quite appreciated. "Remote meter reading is the fastest growing application area in Northern Europe, whereas demand for vehicle telematics is particularly strong in the UK and Italy", stated Tobias Ryberg. "In the coming years we expect that the European automobile manufacturers will accelerate the market growth rate by introducing GSM/GPS emergency call devices as a standard safety feature". There is no doubt about how useful such a device might prove in an emergency situation. This is what they rely on, as they expect it to be applied at a large scale.