2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 - © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 In later years, beyond 2015, an increasing component of traffic is expected to be machine-to-machine communications and transactions over the Internet, especially in industrial applications such as supply chain, process control and also in financial transactions for person to machine. An "Internet of things" will grow up. Machine-to-machine communications for industrial and consumer functions and person-to-machine, for instance to make purchases, will be increasingly an everyday event. The impact on infrastructure will be to increase not only the traffic, but the address space required for all the new respondents. Demographic trends with infrastructure impacts The ageing demography will tend to push telecommunications into new uses requiring augmented infrastructures. Trends in demand for support services for the elderly and in health care could seed completely new extensions of current infrastructures, especially in wireless - for the areas of individual lifestyles and business that cellular mobile services cannot support. Some of the key applications will rely on various forms of sensor networks. Two major applications can be envisaged here - wireless local networks for health care and elderly care including linkages for the use of near field communications (NFC) technologies in body area networks. Trends in response to global warming and natural and manmade disasters Trends towards increasing numbers of natural disasters such as global warming (inducing hurricanes, ocean current perturbations, sea level rises, flooding and seasonal change, etc.) as well as tidal waves, earthquakes, etc. will require new and better security emergency systems and emergency services for physical security. These events will make new infrastructure demands, which must also cope with response to terrorist threats. Such events require physically separate multiple infrastructures which are highly robust and autono