Estonia, Legislation, Technology, Telecomunications

In the estimate of the Estonian government there will be approximately 50 billion devices connected to a communications network in 2020, most of which will be not telephones used for human communication but vehicles, pieces of household equipment and medical equipment, which all need a numbering plan managed by the mobile operators.

"What we see is that the next big changes and innovations will happen not just in the telecom sector, but mobile internet itself will be a major cause of changes and innovation in all walks of life and branches of industry around us," Elisa Eesti CEO Sami Seppanen told BNS. 

Seppanen said Elisa is already now using the existing numbering plans to provide M2M services in addition to voice call and mobile internet services.

"For instance, the pieces of equipment that have telephone numbers already now include the turnpikes of parking lots that can be opened by making a phone call, surveillance systems of homes and businesses, as well as power meters," he said.

Katrin Aron, product manager at Tele2, told BNS that the share of M2M communication or the internet of things is set to increase manyfold in the telecom sector in the coming few years. "According to our estimate more than 90% of businesses will be using machine to machine communication solutions five years from now."

Aron said Tele2 is ready for a M2M boom, having developed a platform for M2M communication this year which manages and enables to control millions of SIM cards and products already now.

Eesti Telekom described developing a 5G network that is capable of serving several times bigger data volumes and numbers of devices, including communication from machine to machine, as the biggest challenge for mobile operators in the coming few years.

"Since millions of new devices will link up to the internet in the coming few years as part of the progress of the internet of things, establishing a new and considerably more capable network cannot be avoided," Eesti Telekom spokesman Raigo Neudorf told BNS. 

Neudorf added that managing the telephone numbers was just the tip of the iceberg.

"What matters much more is how we are going to manage and use huge data masses, or so-called big data, in the future and how so important a change in the environment will affect businesses and the economy in general," Neudorf said. 

The Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has drafted a bill calling for the creation of two billion new 12-digit telephone numbers to be used for M2M communication.

The ministry said the internet of things will offer the possibility to be informed about things in two ways – on the one hand devices connected to the internet provide information about their surroundings garnered with the help of sensors, while being ready to receive commands on the other hand.

Telecom businesses have estimated that the number of phone numbers necessary for M2M communication will grow to 500 million in Estonia in the next 10 years.