The event, titled, ‘Ethics and the Internet of Things – an Oxymoron?’ questions the emergence of ethical ambiguity around machine-to-machine (M2M) communication as it transforms the devices in the world around us into a ubiquitous Internet of Things.

Drawing upon years of expertise as a pioneer in the field, Paul will share Arkessa’s experiences implementing M2M connectivity for devices across a plethora of industries including: healthcare, retail, transport, energy and infrastructure.

The question about data collection, data ownership and data retention remain hot topics of debate within the IT community. The potential for privacy concerns in contrast with the benefits smart services bring, means M2M and IOT area an increasingly poignant area for discussion. Commercial and domestic implementations of these technologies will be explored, alongside examples of current and future possibilities.

Paul will be speaking alongside: Sarah Darby deputy programme leader of the Lower Carbon Futures research team at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. Her research centres on how technologies are adopted and adapted by users, and on the development of smart metering and smart grids.
Also speaking is obin Duke-Woolley CEO of Beecham Research. Beecham Research is a authoritative technology market research, analysis and consulting focused on the M2M and connected devices market.

For further information about the event : Visit the BCS event site › ›

- Jay Bedeau
jaybedeau@arkessa.com

Telecoms professionals from all over the nation and as far as the United States, assembled to celebrate the approaching launch of the Science Museum’s exciting new telecommunications area due in 2014. Further marking the occasion, was the launch of the all-new book ‘Making Telecoms Work’ by Geoff Varrall.

Halam Rose, Senior Engineer of Arkessa and Jay Bedeau Arkessa’s Marketing Executive were in attendance at the exclusive event. Together they provided insight into the role of M2M and it’s place in the world of telecommunications and telemetry.

The evening kicked off with an inspiring speech from Ian Blatchford and Geoff Varrall on the importance of the Science Museum as hub for fresh ideas and predicting the trends of the future. His speech was well received and was the precursor to an evening of networking, nibbles and refreshments – including fantastic 25 year vintage Scottish malt whiskey (for the brave and bold).

The evening saw a melting pot of academics, operators, investors, analysts, manufacturers and developers share ideas and visions in a relaxed yet awe-inspiring setting within the members lounge.

Halam Rose, Arkessa | Right: Geoff Varrall, author ‘Making Telecoms Work’

Arkessa thanks Geoff Varrall, the Science Museum and Wiley publishing for their kind invitation to the event.

Making Telecoms Work is available from Wiley publishing and is approved by the Science Museum.

- Jay Bedeau, Arkessa

Seem familiar?

Today my train was delayed due to a fault at a level crossing before I heard the announcement I already knew the reason. The following true account is from one of our customers and is the perfect example of why I should not have been delayed today.

A railway operator was losing money to reckless car drivers. Drivers were speeding through barriers at level crossings clipping the barrier and damaging it in the process. As one would expect, there is a constant need for a functional barrier at railway crossings as they are imperative for safety. For the railway operator, frequently replacing the barrier was very expensive and incredibly inconvenient for both them and the general public. The operator simply accepted the damages to the barriers as a nuisance and was left with little choice but to bear the brunt of costs and replace the barrier in order to maintain safety at their crossings. However, with no deterrent for reckless drivers, driver behaviour would never change. The costs of constant repairs would inevitably cripple their cash-flow, preventing necessary spend on other vital parts of the rail network. The operator needed a solution to their problem. Stationing an attendant to observe the barriers at each crossing would involve hugely expensive labour costs and a larger administrative workload. Desperate for a smarter solution, the railway operator was keen to share their distress.

After exploring their concerns, sharing thoughts and discussing experiences, together we started to investigate how M2M could solve their problem.

Behind their problem were various hidden challenges and obstacles. The solution had to be easy to install able to exist anywhere across the country from the city suburbs to deep within the countryside (easily install the device with its own address wherever required). Robustness and resilience were also two highly important factors (always being in range of a mobile network to send/receive data) as the device would need to stay outside exposed to the weather. Most important of all, the railway operator needed to obtain clear and comprehensive information about what was going on at these crossings each time they were being damaged, why they were being damaged and who was responsible (an easy way of making sense of whatever the device is doing).

Arkessa enabled the railway operator to install a CCTV solution across their railway barriers. The company was able to use their CCTV to identify reckless drivers and pursue them accordingly – directly or through the courts.

How the solution works

The ability to capture reckless driver’s number plates, created a means to charge drivers for damages to their barriers – reclaiming much of the money lost through repairs. Even better for the operator the potential for legal action against drivers enabled by the presence of functional CCTV cameras proved to be the perfect deterrent for reckless driver behaviour.

I should not have been delayed today

 The remainder of this article will be published at the end of this month.

For more information about the solutions in this article contact us: info@arkessa.com | +44 (0)845 33 11 668 | www.arkessa.com

There were several points of particular interest, particularly how to effectively communicate the benefits of V2X to justify the risk and cost for the public sector. With M2M connectivity at the heart of the these technologies, this is in turn a necessary concern for us. For every country infrastructure technology is hugely important. However, given the sheer age and scale of infrastructure projects, the costs and change create fear amongst public sector representatives. In this time of economic uncertainty, the public sector is noticably hesitant to invest in such changes.

This point was elaborated upon by a representative from the Department of Transport who stressed that the argument for V2X should be public-sector orientated (Department of Transport) more than it is consumer-orientated. They ultimately need concrete answers to justify their ROI in the short and long-term. Where does the extra value come from? What are the additional revenue streams? How will this improve public safety and simplify maintenance? Answers to all these questions are essential.
At Arkessa we have already provided the answers to many of these questions through other applications of M2M so we felt compelled to suggest answers. Extra human value is derived from increased road safety which V2X was quoted as reducing crashes by up to 85%. Thus in turn provides extra monetary value for the public purse by fewer accidents, leading to better traffic conditions and thus a more productive economy. Huge monetary value can be gained by selling constantly-updated information on driver profiles to the private sector and additional benefits include ease of traffic management with vehicles informing the infrastructure of conditions.

Nevertheless, V2X is an exciting sector and for the industry it was pleasing to witness all the players discuss the way forward.

Though session was short but very insightful, Arkessa thanks Telematics Update for the webinar and gathering the key individuals involved in the process of making V2X work effectively.

- Jay Bedeau

Feel free to share your comments on twitter: @arkessa

Owing to our beliefs in the robustness and reliability of our connectivity services, Arkessa was a connectivity provider in the trial. The early findings show a simply incontestable argument for the adoption of telehealth and telecare.

“The early indications show that if used correctly, telehealth can deliver:

• 15% reduction in A&E visits,
• 20% reduction in emergency admissions
• 14% reduction in elective admissions,
• 14% reduction in bed days
• 8% reduction in tariff costs.

More strikingly they also demonstrate a 45% reduction in mortality rates”

– Department for Health (Whole System Demonstrator Findings Report, Dec. 2011)

 

In this study, known as the Whole System Demonstrator Programme, almost 49% of the patients were sufferers of either heart failure, diabetes and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

Data was collected on an ongoing basis under the following categories: service utilisation, participant reported outcomes (such as quality of life, cost effectiveness, experience with the change) and the barriers to adoption.

While the cost reduction element of these results makes business sense, the increased peace of mind of doctors and families which the reduction in mortality rates brings is priceless. These results are a benevolent argument for the advancement of the sector, this is expressed succinctly in the report:

“To make decisions people need information and care services that respond to their needs, not the other way round. We want to make sure that people have access to services and information that help them make their own decisions and one way of doing this would be to enable people to get real time data on their own health status in real time.

That is what assistive technology such as telehealth and telecare can do.”

– Department for Health (Whole System Demonstrators Findings Report, Dec. 2011)

 

Arkessa will continue to work hard enabling M2M within healthcare and we would like to express our sincerest thanks to our partners in the health sector for conducting this trial.

The full report can be found here: http://bit.ly/sRRjY2

This article is written for those unclear about the world of M2M and what it can do for their business.

This is a funny old world we live in. We live in a soup of interconnectivity: everything is connecting with everything else; people with people; people with machines and machines with machines.

During breakfast – breakfast is when I gather my daily harvest of M2M news – I sipped my industrial-strength coffee and a thought suddenly occurred to me. With all these machine-to-machine connections how do you really know what’s going on? The question seems simple enough but the reality is far from it.

To explain the point more clearly, imagine your devices out there in the field as being a class of school children and you are the teacher. While you’re around everything is (relatively) normal but as we all can recall, as soon as the teacher turns their back on the class, all manner of chaos breaks loose: one child is swinging from the ceiling fan, another is drawing all over the desk and another child is having a kip. In short, there are children who aren’t working silently and diligently as they’re supposed to. These children, once again, are just like connections to your devices.

So, with billions of internet connected devices out there on good old planet Earth the question ‘how do you really know what’s going on?’ should be a pressing one for anyone wishing to benefit from M2M. Any successful business wants to keep their costs low, profits high and conduct themselvessuper-efficiently but to do that properly they can’t just ‘deploy and forget’ devices. Just like naughty children, you don’t know what’s going on when nobody is watching.

Transport, healthcare, environment, security, energy and more; all these industries rely increasingly on M2M. Faulty connections and erroneous data can be reduced with proper management. Failing to do so can jeopardise a business’ reputation, profitability and even endanger lives. Emport is our new solution to this problem. Quite simply, Emport acts as teacher’s pet in this case, enabling you to monitor and manage your connections across your entire estate of devices and check any device’s internet connection is working by pinging the device.

The uses for this are far-reaching but here’s a simple example: if the connection to your train timetables goes faulty on Friday, by looking at Emport, you’ll know it’s not working on Friday enabling you to send out the engineer that same day. Everyone wants reliable trains.

If you haven’t already you should have a look at the latest promotional video for Emport, hopefully you’ll see why I feel it changes everything.

Arkessa’s Technology and Marketing Director, Paul Green, is a keynote speaker for this leading industry event. It will take place at the Freescale offices in Glasgow, on the 24th of November, from 10:00am to 15:15.

“M2M Connecting the next 50 billion” will discuss health and safety and how we can work toward improving this in real life situations, and how to increase security and energy efficiency through machine to machine communications.

The programme includes presentations from industry speakers, panel sessions and tabletop demonstrations showcasing advancements in M2M solutions in Service provision, Sensor, Wireless and Software technology.

Get Connected with M2M leaders –people setting the pace on technology, people providing and using M2M services today…..Sensors for Medical and Security, Digital Signage, Cloud and Network service providers, Whitespace Communications and more to come. Speakers confirmed so far include …..

• Google
• Arkessa
• Neul
• Smart Sensors Ltd
• Speckled Computing
• bSquare
• IMS Research
• IBM
• McLaren
• British Waterways
• Freescale
• Eykona

For more information about this event please visit Cambridge Wireless or Contact Us.

The glamorous Hyatt Churchill held the event, a stone’s throw from Marble Arch station in central London. Several MNOs, MVNOs, EMDIs, EMDOs and other telcos were in attendance. From the very first conference day the networking atmosphere was a relaxed mix of small and large players within the mobile roaming space.

Talks covered a plethora of topics including: hubbing solutions, M2M roaming, competitive data pricing strategies, European regulation and the difficulties in creating a workable WiFi strategy. The hot-topic at this year’s summit was emphasising to the industry that the demand for LTE changes the dynamics of the market irrevocably. For most, this was common knowledge but the way to market 4G and the necessity for competitive, value-added services, were recurring themes among the talks.

As expected, speakers delivered an abundance of important statistics, including Dhiraj Bhazir’s presentation in which his data predicted 500 million M2M devices by 2014 and 1.5 billion smart meters by 2020. Sticking with the theme of M2M, our CTO, Paul Green gave the audience great insight into roaming from an M2M perspective. Paul also invited the audience to consider the inertia of some M2M providers and how Arkessa has solved a fundamental problem in allowing stationary devices to connect to several legacy and new networks for resilience and multinational coverage.

A dispute occurred as a representative from INTUG (International Telecommunications Users Group) suggested the price for roaming be eliminated; the speaker was rebuked by an MNO executive in the audience. Her criticism of the INTUG rep centred around the viability of putting roaming price on a glide path towards free considering the difficulty and scale of costs involved (let alone the challenges of establishing transnational, bilateral agreements). The INTUG rep responded by explaining the fear of bill-shock caused by roaming charges from the point-of-view of the average end-user.

This dichotomy between consumer expectations and pricing was echoed in a WiFi-centred talk by Bernd Hoogkamp of TeliaSonera which detailed the extent of the threat of WiFi. Ben Bannister of MACH reasoned that increased consumer control of roaming charges were the solution – demonstrating an app which charges the user per day based around their data usage (e.g. Facebook day pass, general web, etc).

All in all, the Mobile Roaming World Summit provided healthy discussion and was a great opportunity to gather a snapshot of where roaming is headed.

Thank you to everyone who talked with us and please feel free to continue the dialogue on Twitter (@arkessa) or on Google+

- Jay Bedeau

Paul Green, Arkessa’s Technology and Marketing Director, will be speaking at 2:30pm, the subject being; Offering pan-European services – how will the domestic market fare?

16-17 November 2011 : In 2010 we looked at creating innovative roaming solutions and pricing, supplementing roaming with alternative revenue streams, the latest EU regulations and their impact on operations, and the importance of hubbing and convergence.

This year, we will once again bring you the very hottest topics to be discussed by thought leaders in the industry. In a two-day fully interactive conference you will have the opportunity to compare notes on best practices, hear what your competitors are doing, and prepare for the next step in the roaming market.

Emport brings all the information about remote infrastructure to one place

14 November 2011, Cambridge UK : Arkessa, the remote internet company which makes M2M easy, has built a web-based software application that enables a multi-network estate of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections to be managed via a single graphical dashboard.

The dashboard is central to Arkessa’s new M2M asset management portal, Emport. This portal enables, for the first time, managers to view, monitor and tune their entire register of M2M connections at the same time. Compatible with all networks and all operators, Emport joins existing estates of connections, from within any country, to the global or universal networks that provide world-wide coverage on multiple networks.

“Our goal was to make available the data that M2M managers value most, and give it to them instantly,” said Paul Green, director of marketing and technology at Arkessa. “We also recognise the need to make a system that’s flexible and intuitive. Emport is a vital and powerful tool for managers that is incredibly easy to use.”

Filtering of the data stored within Emport reveals the information that is of value. This is achieved by interacting directly with the portal’s on-screen graphics. Interaction via mouse clicks to pie and bar charts enable Emport to reveal, instantly, information that is focused on any number of parameters of choice, such as specific device groups, connections or geographical areas of interest.

User-defined tags can be applied to each connection within Emport. This assists with the identification of each connection, and enables the filtering into sets defined by users. However, when more information is required than can be held within a tag, Emport can be directed to data held within a company’s own IT systems.

In this way details, such as contacts, service level agreements, emergency numbers and preferred contractors, can be copied to user-defined fields and held within Emport for reference. This information is automatically checked and refreshed constantly, ensuring it is always up to date.

Emport automatically stores data for analysis purposes, enabling users to watch trends and monitor the performance of connections over time. This shows quickly which connections are not performing as expected. While the performance of each connection can be analysed, its running cost can be recorded by carrier and location. These costs can be contained by use of a range of features, including data alerts and caps that prevent over use and ‘bill shock’.

Paul Green said: “Arkessa is an innovator that’s making M2M easy to work with. Until now, the information that would be incredibly useful to IT, network and facilities managers has been buried and spread across a variety of systems. We’ve built an application that brings that information to one place, is as easy to use as an iPhone and can even incorporate external information that’s vital to the running of a business.”

The creation of Emport is Arkessa’s response to research, carried out in recent years, that revealed M2M managers desire immediate access to data that’s relevant and live. They want it quickly, and they need to analyse the current information along side its history.

From within Emport, the viability of each connection can be monitored, live, from the dashboard. If the connection is inactive, it can be pinged directly from the same screen, without the need to go to a different application.

Anticipating that customers for Emport will have a variety of needs and be operating within quite different business models, Arkessa has developed a range of scalable licence packages. While the entry-level standard package is intended for single user organisation, each managing up to 5,000 connections, a top-level ‘White Label’ package appropriate to mobile network operators, Systems Integrators and major corporate users, can be supplied with any level of customisation and branding that is required.

Emport, which is supported by Arkessa’s world-class support services, is available now.

More information about the product and how it can be integrated into different businesses can be obtained from Adrian Currall at Arkessa. For more information about Arkessa and Emport:

www.arkessa.com/emport

Product enquiries:
Adrian Currall
+44 845 33 11 668
adrian.currall@arkessa.com

Media enquiries
Andrew Watts
+44 7776 046335
andrew.watts@tallispr.com

About Arkessa

Arkessa.com
Arkessa uses wireless cellular communication systems to connect things to other things, systems and people, enabling them to operate, be managed and controlled as though they were connected directly via the internet.

Arkessa is a pioneer of machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions for systems integrators and government organisations that support critical infrastructure, environmental services and mission-critical facilities. It also provides vital tools to those building an internet of things, including Mosaic and Emport. Arkessa’s wireless network services enable organisations to innovate, get closer to their customers, reduce costs, improve performance and enhance profitability. In addition to managing assets on the move, including buses, ships, trains, horses and people, many leading organizations depend on Arkessa to manage fixed facilities remotely, including CCTV, energy, HVAC, pumps, process plants, shops, street lamps, oil installations and railway crossings.

Supported by its partnership with global telecoms giant KDDI Telehouse, Arkessa’s services are meeting the growing demand for wireless networking in many markets. It is a founder member of Cambridge Wireless and of the m2mglobal network.