In the two years since AT&T launched its new business unit – the Emerging Devices organization – the company has connected an additional 11 million devices. In his keynote speech this morning, David Haight, VP Business Development, Emerging Devices, AT&T, explained, “Our mission is to enable everything to connect to everything else that would be enhanced by that connectivity; for us that’s the next big thing.” The company is doing this by enabling third parties to work with it to offer services. As Haight said, “The customization with be through collaboration.”

He pointed out that in the last four years, AT&T’s mobile data traffic had increased 8,000 times, but that growth will be dwarfed by the rise that AT&T is expecting by 2015 – a rise of eight to 10 times the level where it is now.

Haight added that each device will have its own business model, depending on the apps and data it uses, and that AT&T is building the ecosystem that will be necessary to support them.
Already AT&T has added 11 million new devices to its network in the last two years, driven largely by home security applications and tracking assets for insurance purposes. He reckoned that traffic from eReaders and tablets would generate huge amounts of traffic by consumers in the near future.

He also cited eHealth, connectivity in automobiles (diagnostics and safety features as well as connectivity for the driver and passengers in the front and back seats) as well as the home. Haight said that there would be interconnectivity between these different areas too, for example between the car and the home, to let the driver know the garage door has been left open, for example.

He concluded that AT&T saw third parties as the way to offer its customers a choice of services and products via the ecosystem and added, “We need to engage with all of them to generate revenue and value for the whole ecosystem.”

As AT&T spends around $20 billion on what Haight described as “stuff,” the company is evidently keen to generate as much revenue as it can as soon as it can, including accelerating the rollout of LTE which is now scheduled to be completed by the end of 2013.