According to a report from Informa Telecoms & Media, 58 percent of the world's major telecom operator groups are operating connected fleets. The most common uses include driver behavior monitoring, navigation, information/entertainment, and enhanced fleet-management telematics.

Informa's report, Enterprise Verticals Activity Monitor (EVAM), benchmarks telecom operators by their publically announced activities in the sector over the past 24 months. Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, and Vodafone topped the rankings.

According to the report, Deutsche Telekom scores highly on all three dimensions of the scorecard: market presence, geographic reach and financial potential. The operator benefits from long-running relationships with global automotive OEMs and integrators based in Germany, plus T-Systems’ high-value IT services. It also scores on readiness to exploit the fast-developing market for information/entertainment and telematics services in passenger vehicles.

According to the report, leading operators are pursuing higher-value opportunities through the development of applications, platforms and partnerships with telematics-service providers (TSPs). However, Informa’s recently published Connected Vehicle Survey found differences of opinion about expected ARPU from the consumer market. Respondents from the automotive sector expect many services to be bundled into the price of the car, but communications service providers are more positive, estimating ongoing ARPU in a high-income country at between US$5 and US$20 per month.

The top 10 operator groups in the Enterprise Verticals Activity Monitor ranking for automotive are: Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Vodafone, Verizon, Telefonica, AT&T, Orange, Telenor, China Unicom and NTT. The EVAM benchmark is based on public information released between 3Q11 and 2Q13 covering B2B, B2B2C and B2C services and applications for private passenger cars, commercial automotive transportation and managers of vehicle fleets.