AUTOMATED communication between machines is advancing in Tanzania, with sim cards for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication rising by 4.3 percent in the past three months.

Latest report by the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) shows that in June 2024, there were 962,928 M2M sim cards in use, up from 937,257 in April.

Vodacom leads the sector with 551,541 M2M sim cards, representing 57.3 percent of all M2M subscriptions, followed by Airtel with 34.2 percent, and Halotel holds 6.0 percent.

The Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) which had 299 M2M sim cards in April; this year has reported none in the category.

M2M communication technology enables devices to automatically exchange data without human intervention. Examples include smart electricity meters that track energy consumption in real-time and wearable devices that monitor physical activity, heart rate and other metrics, transferring data to smartphones and networked computers.

TCRA statistics indicate that as of June 2024, there were 7,721 wearables in use in Tanzania.

Overall, mobile subscriptions for Person-to-Person (P2P) and M2M communication have grown by 58.5 percent from 47,685,232 in 2019 to 75,588,006 in June 2024. Additionally, data bundle tariffs decreased by 0.6 percent between April and June.

Average call tariffs within the same network (on-net) and to other networks (off-net) have converged since 2020 due to gradual reductions. On-net call charges fell from 149/- in 2019 to 26/- in June 2024 while off-net tariffs decreased from 189/- to 28/-.

From 2019 to 2023, off-net traffic grew at a rate seven times faster than on-net traffic. On-net minutes increased from 55,812,036,633 in 2019 to 77,770,241,513 in 2023 while off-net minutes surged from 11,570,993,820 to 67,100,445,506.

This growth is attributed to the significant drop in interconnection charges which fell from 15.6/- in 2018 to 1.76/-in January 2024.

M2M communication refers to communication between entities which can be objects, devices or things that exchange information and carry out actions with minimal or no human intervention using existing or evolving communication networks. They are technologies that allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of similar ability.

In M2M, sensors attached to machines relay information of the events that the machines experience to an application that analyses the data and makes decisions in real time or near to real time.