M2M applications can be used for smart homes, smart meters, fleet management, mobile workforce, and vending machines, as well as for industry sectors healthcare, agriculture, commercial, industrial, retail, and utility. These smart grid applications smart meters, wireless sensors and software so customers and utilities can closely monitor energy use. The IP-based smart grid model ultimately helps consumers understand the economics of their consumption patterns so they can make intelligent decisions about their power consumption.

The smart grid technology will also help to enhance reliability and energy efficiency, lower power-line losses and provide utilities with the ability to remotely automate service, providing cost-savings for consumers.

Key benefits of the point to point smart meter solution to utility companies include:
• improved speed of deployment over traditional meshed networks
• the simplicity of an open standard, IP-based network
• the ability to communicate directly with each meter.

These include LTE, mobile WiMAX, WiFi and ZigBee for smart grid applications. What investors should not be confused about is the outlook for this sector, which is nothing short of spectacular. Between the cost benefits, the lower emissions, and federal funding, investing in smart grid technologies now is a no-brainer.

In the U.S., it took only 25 years for commercial mobile phone technology to evolve from mainly business users of Motorola's "brick" to everyone over the age of four owning one. In the same way, the early trial programs of smart grid technologies today will become ubiquitous, only it will happen much more quickly. The reason is simple: The cheapest watt is the watt you don't have to produce. Eliminating waste is by far the low-hanging fruit in the energy sector.

Smart grids are bound to see a range of deployment strategies. Depending on the topology of the area, you’re going to either use wireless or cellular or WiMAX or LTE or wireless mesh. As such, the utilities and wireless carriers are in natural alignment. The gains for the carriers are in fact so substantial they’re going to do just about anything to stay ahead of the curve in this race.

Imagine if you will a utility sitting in a state where the spectrum holder isn’t intending to build out a network in the next couple of years? What you’ll see is a natural alignment between the utilities and the 4G network operators, which will be mutually beneficial. That is, the utilities will be able to build smart grid networks to meet their needs ... and the network operators will be able to accelerate their deployments cost-effectively.

Like any good green initiative, smart grid is as much about saving the planet as it is about making money. Regardless of how electrical grids get their education and become “smart,” the carriers seem to have a nose for turning such undertakings into profit.

NextGen GES is positioned to enable utilities, VCs, vendors, and operators in their strategy by recruiting KEY executives who can drive these initiatives.