For the fourth time running, analysts at Gartner have classified Vodafone as the world’s leading provider of managed M2M services in its Magic Quadrant; the mobile company in particular stands out for its “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision”: Thanks to its own technologies and services and those provided by its partners, Vodafone can offer comprehensive end-to-end managed M2M solutions, from IoT edge devices, device management software, and cloud services through analyses and applications.

The ability of products, devices, machines, and systems to communicate with each other via wired or wireless media and without human assistance and to control actuators is called “machine-to-machine communication”. M2M is therefore a central basis for IT business models in production and a key component of state-of-the-art automation. The radio technology NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) is one of the most promising connectivity innovations in M2M communication. Deutsche Telekom has been rolling out such an LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) network based on 3GPP since the start of the year. The provider is encountering competition from French solution Sigfox , among others.