Verizon’s LTE network is second to none in the United States. The company is so confident in its existing infrastructure that it has already announced plans to sunset its 2G and 3G networks.  While Verizon says it remains committed to its 2G and 3G M2M customers, change is inevitable. Wireless Week recently sat down with Praveen Atreya, director of Verizon’s innovation program, who had a few things to say about how M2M is set to evolve going forward. 

Wireless Week: Verizon Wireless is known for its network, most recently its leadership in LTE. What kinds of M2M solutions are best suited for a fast, high-capacity connection like LTE? 

Praveen Atreya: Video and M2M are not mutually exclusive. There are multiple M2M solutions that use video. There’s plenty of room for LTE to transmit video from the field to uplink. Some of it is broadcaster-type video, which I want to be able to see what’s going and send it to the studio, where it should be HD and of a quality that is worthy to being broadcast to consumers. Also, there are solutions tied to video like surveillance and video monitoring, both consumer and enterprise and then there’s intelligence put upon these solutions to figure out what kind of action needs to be taken. So video is a key part of the M2M story and LTE is a key enabler for video. So really we see plenty of video application that M2M oriented over LTE.

WW: Given Verizon’s stated plans to sunset 2G and 3G CDMA, how does the company think about its current customers operating on 2G and helping them make the transition to LTE? 

PA: Here’s how I look at it. LTE is more than just about speed. The bandwidth aspects, there’s a lot of quickness, less latency, so the M2M device is a lot more responsive. It’s also secure and most importantly it’s also plug-and-play. There’s zero setup involved. You turn on the device and lo and behold the device carries a high-bandwidth, untethered broadband network with it. So I think the combination of all of those features makes for more than just a speed story. 

A few years ago, if you wanted to do HD 1080p then maybe you should use LTE, but for everything else you don’t really need it. That’s changed significantly. The perception now is that LTE makes innovative ideas more actionable. 

I’ll give you a couple examples of how some of our customers are moving to LTE. It’s value-based. They’re adding more services and so they need a robust enough platform to add more services. So the security guy wants to be able to do video-based security, and the utility guy wants to be able to monitor even more sensors in a given area. Or may he wants to monitor more information from existing sensors, or real-time capabilities and so on. So it’s really that LTE gives you an expandable platform to add more capabilities to existing M2M applications and really makes them future proof.   

WW: For certain M2M applications, security is essential. I'm thinking of things like mHealth and freight tracking. How does Verizon ensure that solutions that deal with personal patient information, or the transport of sensitive materials, meet stringent security standards? 

PA: We’re 100 percent customer focused, and the customer could be the consumer, the enterprise, the government; we deal with all of these. So we understand the unique needs of our customers, and security is one of those things that’s an absolute must have. You have to have this. You get egg on your face if you don’t have security. This is not just a network security piece. Our LTE network has encryption, non-repudiation for our users, but it doesn’t end there. We’ve also have our cloud offerings, and they’ve all been certified, medical grade, federal grade, enterprise grade in these kinds of requirements. So we understand what our customer’s needs depending on who they are both for data in rest and data in motion, so we develop solutions keeping those needs in mind. Security is one of those absolutely key imperatives. 

WW: How does accommodating an M2M solution on the network differ from more traditional devices like tablets and smartphones? 

PA: I think M2M solutions have their unique needs, whether there are different rates of data, different times. For example, if you have connectivity in multiple smart meters then you want to be cognizant that you don’t want all of them to wake up at once and hit the network at exactly the same second a given night. There are unique needs for each solution, and we are very cognizant of these in terms of unmanned devices, retrying in case of situations where they’re not able to get on the network and/or being able to send their data when they need it. It’s very different from the consumer in front of screen on-demand type of application. These are different solutions. And we have price plans to accommodate those different M2M solutions and essentially take advantage of the fact that they’re not in the same category. 

WW: Are there any innovative trends you see in the M2M space that are set to really take off in 2013? 

PA: The steady drumbeat of M2M is only going to grow exponentially. We have solutions for remote monitoring, for fleet monitoring. We have a tank-monitoring solution—a sensor that monitors liquid levels—and the benefit remote monitoring, the ability to fill on demand, the ability to optimize fleet operations. These kinds of solutions are significantly growing across the board. We have another solution, partnering with a company called Big Belly Solar, who build waste management station—essentially a trash compactor—and the solution there is embedded where they can monitor when the compactor is full, when it’s time to pick up. I see these trends continuing to ramp up. In addition there are some very non-traditional trends entering the space as well—hands free, wearable computing for the enterprise, which we expect to also grow significantly in 2013 and beyond.