If TomTom were a country, its mobile penetration would rank between Gambia and Gabon (137th)

In the report I wrote for the Dutch government on M2M (or embedded wireless, or internet of things), quantifying the size of the market for M2M was one of the important issues. Today TomTom published some of its ambitions with real time traffic information and its HD traffic product in a Manifesto. As part of this they give a number of the amount of devices that are GPRS/UMTS enabled: 1.38 million!

If TomTom were a country, it would rank between Gambon and Gabon in terms of active mobile devices or 137th. Its goal is even more ambitious and that is to bring 20 to 25 million devices on the road, which puts it in the range of  The Netherlands, Australia and Taiwan, somewhere around 35th to 40th in the world rankings. Yes people, that would mean that TomTom would have more devices in the field than many European mobile companies.

M2M is going to be really big and it will change the relationships between telco's and M2M end users.