Once you start putting SIM cards in cars you are going to start to roam. Not only will M2M roaming produce almost as many puns as the cloud does, but it too will require serious consideration by many different parties.
The most obvious ‘roaming’ issue is when a car, for instance, is made in one country and exported to another. Are the SIM card or cards put in at the point of manufacture or the point of (local) distribution? If they are put in by the manufacturer, then the SIM are roaming as soon as they are delivered, if not they soon will be once the car is sold.
However, and wherever the SIM is installed, the roaming must be fast and foolproof, it must provide a similar level of experience as in the home territory. If your car supplier sells you a package of diagnostic care that will instantly tell you exactly what is wrong with the windscreen wipers, a message while roaming that simply says there is something wrong with the windscreen wipers is not good enough.
If you go on a driving holiday around Europe, for instance, this information must be the same whichever country you are in. In addition, the roaming charges must be invisible. It is simply not believable that customers will pay for their cars to roam.
This means that either the service provider or car supplier will pick up the roaming charges – a possibility – or that roaming for machines will become agnostic, and disappear.
In other words, only humans will be charged to roam, not machines.
In Europe, in particular, politicians and powerful influential people have been working hard to bring down artificial boundaries for the last 50 years. Perhaps it is time for these artificial boundaries to come down completely.
Perhaps this trend will be driven by the car.
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