It’s another sign that the global M2M market is rapidly developing and its customers are demanding a slicker deal than the one they’re often offered at the moment.

Today a large deployment might involve the customer or its integrator having to negotiate connectivity deals with multiple operators - difficult, time-consuming and full of gotchas.

Enter the ‘carrier alliance’ model. This is where a cluster of carriers set out to develop and maintain a single connectivity offer across an entire region with special attention paid to interoperability, joint service level assurance and a consistent level of customer support.

That’s a sentence that rolls easily off the keyboard but is much harder to pull off in the real world, a point that hasn’t escaped the attention of Alessandro Adriani, CEO of Bridge Alliance, the superset carrier alliance of 31 from which the members of the Bridge M2M Alliance have been drawn.

“Asia is made up of highly varied economies, uneven technological development and diversified regulatory requirements,” says Adriani. “As a result, multinational businesses find it extremely difficult to navigate the intricacies of the region and to fully capitalise on economies of scale.”

The alliance says it’s “determined to build an innovative ecosystem by partnering technology players in the M2M value chain like application developers, module manufacturers and service providers.

The Bridge M2M Alliance comprises Bridge Alliance members Airtel (India), AIS (Thailand), CSL (Hong Kong), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), MobiFone (Vietnam), Optus (Australia), SingTel (Singapore), SK Telecom (South Korea), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan) and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

The group has a combined base of over 500 million subscribers and therefore claims to be the largest M2M alliance in the Asia Pacific region.

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