hen have a meaningful conversation were insufficiently standardised to support widespread market adoption. This was identified as a potential problem for Bluetooth enabled devices. As with many prognostications we were partly right. Agreeing the Bluetooth procedures for device-to-device discovery and device-to-device communication proved to be a Herculean process and work is still ongoing in this area. In November 2007 we thought it was time for a sequel - Will the Pot Call the Kettle Back? (2). The original article focused on device-to-device communications in the home. Eight years later the focus had shifted to corporate, specialist and consumer machine-to-machine com- munication, the machine-to-machine (M2M) triple-play proposition. In 2007 it was estimated that there were ten microcontrollers for every human on the planet with the microcontroller population growing faster over time - a 60 billion unit target market. On that basis the machine-to-machine market represented a high-value high-growth revenue opportunity. This was, and is, undoubtedly true but five years on our electricity, gas and water meters generally still read by people, I buy my train ticket from a man in a ticket office (very helpful chap by the way), check the level of water in our water butt by lifting the lid and looking inside, check the oil level in the car by wiping the dipstick and open the curtains at home by hand. I use a conventional diary because the access times are faster and I use a map in the car because I hate being told what to do. So the question is, are the big opportunities in the corporate, specialist or consumer domain, what are the market adoption barriers that are holding back genuinely ubiquitous machine-to- machine communication and how can these barriers be overcome and/or have they already been overcome, which must be the assumption behind some of the more bullish market forecasts. Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Pu