Automatic Meter Reading and Smart Energy Projected Winners says In-Stat

In-Stat has projected Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and Smart Energy to be the leading applications for 802.15.4 and ZigBee wireless sensor networks from among nine primary application categories. Other application categories include industrial process control, residential automation and building control.

 

The usage of ZigBee has become more focused on the growing smart energy application. According to Brian O’Rourke, an analyst at In-Stat (News - Alert), utilities and governments are leveraging such technologies to provision, monitor and bill customers more efficiently.

 

Due to ZigBee’s marketing efforts in the recent years, the largest mind share in the wireless sensor networking space is owned by the company itself.

 

In-Stat Multimedia and Interface Technologies have recently conducted research on the worldwide market for 802.15.4 technologies. The report detailing the same has been titled “802.15.4 – A New Sense of Energy” and is priced at $3,295.

 

Forecasts for nodes and chipset deployments by category and also by region as well as the average selling prices of 802.15.4 microcontrollers through the year 2012 have been included in the report.

 

There are predictions that 802.15.4 node and chipset units will reach 292 million by the year 2012 as against the figure of seven million in 2007. It has also been found that through the efforts of RF4CE, 802.15.4 has started to emerge in consumer electronic markets.

 

Also, the research contains predictions of bill of material costs and average revenues through 2012. Analysis of wired protocols and standards, types of applications and components have also been included in the report. The existence of fragmentation among competing sensor network technologies is also demonstrated by the fact that only one third of 802.15.4 chips contain a ZigBee stack.

 

The information contained in the report has been gathered from interviews with companies in the field and in consideration of product specifications and data sheets. Companies of the 802.15.4 infrastructure and vendors of complementing and competing standards were also interviewed in the process.

 

Secondary research was collected from company websites, financial reports, product brochures as well as white papers. In-Stat provides actionable research, market analysis and forecasts of advanced communication services, end-user devices and semiconductors.