Telemetry & M2M, What’s the difference?

Our 20 year legacy lies in the area of remote telemetry, so what’s the difference between Telemetry & M2M?

M2M is a term that refers to data communications between machines. M2M is most commonly translated as Machine-to-Machine but has sometimes been translated as Man-to-Machine, Machine-to-Man, Machine-to-Mobile and Mobile-to-Machine. M2M generally refers to telemetry that is accomplished using networks, especially public wireless networks.

In the past, telemetry systems were the exclusive domain of very large well financed organisations. NASA used telemetry extensively from the very beginning of the space program and which was probably one of the first applications. Large oil and gas companies and electric utilities, through the use of extensive customer built dedicated data networks, were a couple of the first private organisations to use telemetry.

In recent years, the cost of access to public wireless data networks (GPRS, GSM, EDGE, 3G, Broadband etc.) has been dropping while the capabilities of these networks continues to increase.

M2M generally refers to technology that leverages these networks to bring telemetry to a much wider audience. In addition, M2M sometimes refers to similar leveraging of the internet. In this case, the term is more or less equivalent to another term, Pervasive Internet.