This from Pyramid Research's latest squint into the future of the M2M market. The Chinese cellular M2M market, it says, will become the world's largest this year, with device volumes increasing by over 40 per cent to reach 45 million and growing on to reach 138 million by 2017.

That performance will in large part be because of the support offered by the Chinese government which sees a long-term market in M2M devices, cloud services, software and so on. It is also being stimulated by a government push for intelligent electricity grid development.

Pyramid points out just how much different national markets are affected by regulation at this stage of M2M development.

"Telematics regulations will be the strongest driver in Brazil, the European Union

(EU) and Russia," says Pyramid. "However, within the EU, different countries have differing levels of

enthusiasm, and it is unclear how regulations will be introduced country-by-country."

Government action can stimulate development but legislative gotchas can also drop it in its tracks: things like privacy and security concerns can rear up to de-rail government-mandated programmes for smart metering, for instance. The report points to Brazil where a smart meter opt-out was recently announced.