Mobile Giant Orange Takes the Plunge Into the Water Business

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Veolia Water and Europe's leading mobile carrier Orange just launched m2o city, a mobile carrier specialized in water metering and collecting data from other environmental sensors.

Veolia Water specializes outsources water services for municipal authorities and companies. It operates in 67 countries and provides water services to 100 million people.

Smart electricity metering may have grabbed all the headlines but managing water will also become crucial in tomorrow's world. Less than 1 percent of the earth's water is suitable for drinking and as the world's population grows and becomes more urban, more than 3 billion people may suffer from water shortages by the year 2025.

Consumer electronics company LG launched its first water treatment solution last year. GE and Siemens have also been investing  heavily in water technology in recent years.

It may seem surprising that Orange is launching an entirely new mobile carrier just for water metering. However, mobile carriers have been targeting  M2M (machine to machine) or "Internet of things" applications for some time. M2M applications gather data from huge numbers of sensors and devices and applications include automotive (see TomTom's HD traffic), smartgrid, healthcare and environmental usages.

The characteristics of M2M traffic on a Telecommunications network are different to human-to-human or human-to-machine communications like voice and data. Sensors often send small amounts of data periodically, but potentially all at the same time, like meter readings. Some of the systems based on M2M data like smartgrid may be critical and even life-threatening, so high quality of service is essential. Therefore, networks need to optimized specifically for M2M applications.

Swedish mobile carrier Telenor previously launched a global mobile carrier specializing in M2M applications called Telenor Connexion.

Tags: Internet of things, m2m, water

Companies: GE, Orange, siemens, Telenor Connexion, Veolia Water

By JENNIFER PRESTON 28 Mar, 2011

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=19fcf5b178fb932c0e069ad698487174
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