Swiss mobile operator Swisscom and Ericsson have announced a partnership to develop the M2M market including mobile health services. The partners will offer M2M services to enterprises, both domestically and when they have operations abroad. The service is based on Ericsson’s Device Connection Platform. Trials will start this month with a commercial service scheduled for summer 2012. The Swiss operator estimates a long-term potential market of up to 100 million connected devices and machines for its M2M service domestically.  It says “several hundred thousand” machines are already connected in Switzerland.

Anders Runevad, Ericsson’s head of region western & central Europe, described the Swisscom deployment as “one of the world’s first large-scale M2M market introductions”.  Industries that will make use of M2M technology will likely include healthcare alongside utilities, government and transport. Swisscom set up a specialist M2M unit at the end of 2011.