 role to play in machine-to-machine connectivity in some corporate and specialist applications it is harder to see the rationale for home-hub applications. Arguably, all femtocells do is increase the user's energy bill. And anyway, why use wireless given that most of these appliances are connected to a mains socket. The Home Plug Powerline Alliance6 supports a set of standards for transferring IP 6 www.homeplug.org. Making Telecoms Work packets between devices. This includes entertainment devices and entertainment hubs (back to those smart televisions we talked about in Chapter 9) and smart energy networks. 7 18.8 Summary M2M is a fast growth sector attracting the attention and support of a wide range of vendors and more recently a relatively broad cross section of operators offering bespoke solutions. Traditional VHF and UHF radio modems can still be cost and performance effective in many applications. In order to compete, cellular-based propositions need to be carefully costed, well deployed and well supported and for most applications have access to inexpensive (under utilized) bandwidth. There are essentially three markets, corporate, specialist and consumer. There is substantial overlap between corporate and specialist applications and crossover opportunities between machine-to-machine and telemetry applications. Consumer machine-to-machine is substan- tially different. Entertainment applications are inherently more bandwidth hungry, energy management applications less SO. Traditional difficulties associated with device discovery can potentially be resolved by using NFC technologies integrated into cellular phones and hand-held communication devices. This would seem to suggest that consumer M2M could be potentially serviced by low-cost femtocells offering cellular compatibility. However, the consumer M2M market is aggressively addressed by WiFi products that offer higher data rates than femtocells at lower unit costs. WiFi products still have substantial cost- optimisation and performance-gain potential. For