As the tax deadline looms over all of us in the U.S. this time of year, other parts of the world nearing their fiscal year have been busy devising new ways of collecting and distributing tax information to their respective governments.
In Chennai, New Delhi, the Chennai Tax Corporation (CTC), an organization annually tasked with collecting property tax from the town’s registered commercial and residential property owners , has now been equipped with a total of 300 machine-to-machine devices to do so, rather than the usual time-consuming process of its field staff collecting door-to-door and manually tallying the amounts.
These handheld, SIM card-based machines are designed to match the taxes paid with the amount due, and do so by connecting to a mobile network linked to a central database server. The end result is a more streamlined process, with a smaller window for errors and a significantly lowered transaction period.
Now, Chennai is ready to take this M2M capability a step further by sending automated mobile alerts to property owners. This will necessitate the involvement of Airtel (News - Alert), the country’s largest mobile services provider, to provide the network these alerts will be transmitted on.
The CTC’s usage of SIM card-based machines is only a mark on the map for how M2M is playing a crucial role in providing important information to citizens. In Bhubaneswar, 50 of the Orissa State Transport Corp.’s buses have seats embedded with SIM card-based devices built to send alerts to digital billboards at bus stops to specify how many seats are vacant. Meanwhile, in Punjab, the state’s education department has enlisted biometrics on top of a SIM card-based device to transmit attendance numbers of government-hired teachers to a central database.
With the uptake in M2M usage, telecom companies are optimistic on the technology’s trajectory growth. Najib Khan, chief marketing officer of Enterprise Services for Bharti Airtel (News - Alert), boldly said in an article hosted on The Economic Times, "Connected devices using telecom networks will explode. They will overtake the human subscriber base by 2020 or even earlier."
More specifically, some telecom companies are betting on SIM card devices to function beyond public municipalities and to become the norm in homes. For example, one expert referred to SIM card devices being used for the prevention of car theft so drivers could activate or deactivate locks through the simple transmission of a SMS text. Others see M2M and SIM-based devices emerging in the energy sector, much like the smart grid and techniques for maintaining energy efficiency has exploded in the U.S.
According to Marc Lorenzi, vice president of Operations for iQsim, a company specializing in virtual SIM technology, there is a critical need for virtual SIM technology in the M2M space. “Having the capability to change the SIM or to aggregate SIMs on demand to collect or distribute large amount of data in a small amount of time... can significantly reduce the cost or size the bandwidth of M2M communication between devices,” he said.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli