Cox Communications is launching an Internet of Things as a service program called Cox2M, and it’s kicking off the program with a nationwide deployment of 500,000 commercial vehicles. This deployment, for the record, is the largest low-power wide-area IoT deployment in the world as of this writing. Cox Communications is billing this deployment as a “connected asset services” business, and is aiming it squarely at enterprise and government use cases and clientele. The idea is that Cox Communications will utilize its broadband and cellular holdings throughout its covered area to provide IoT as a service for commercial use.
The real appeal of this service is that Cox Communications is not just offering it for devices and assets that are already IoT-capable or IoT-friendly; the company is offering to help businesses use IoT to connect and monitor just about any asset with comprehensive IoT solutions across the board, allowing companies to track and monitor fleets, check the condition of power lines and network hardware, and check data inputs from custom hardware, among other use cases. This makes Cox2M ideal not just for commercial and government use, but also smart cities, real estate operations, and just about any other application where the ability to accept input from, track, and monitor a large number of data sources from a one-stop, easy-to-implement solution would be useful.
Cox Automotive is the client for the aforementioned deployment of 500,000 connected vehicles, and is the very first client for Cox2M. Since Cox2M comes with a number of sensors and other IoT gear for just about any customized deployment, the range of possible use cases, and thus partners, is limited only by Cox Communications’ coverage and sales prowess. Just about any business or government entity, up to and including full-blown smart cities, can benefit from Cox2M in some way. Cox Communications ran a pilot of Cox2M for the aforementioned vehicle fleet throughout last year, and the switch has been flipped to activate the full fleet and the full range of features. Naturally, this means that the service is officially available and ready to begin deployments on a commercial scale as of this writing.