Do you ever drive by an excavation or road construction project and think to yourself, “Hmph… the Anywhere network won’t affect work like that in a decade.” The funny thing is that you’d be completely right but for the wrong reason — the Anywhere network extends to construction equipment today. How? Many backhoes have built-in wireless network connections today

Telco 2.0 has an excellent story today on how backhoe manufacturer JCB has worked with Qualcom has been starting to build in Qualcom’s GPS/GSM modules into its backhoes. Now this is more than a location-based asset tracking service; location is just one of the pieces of data that the backhoe sends back through its Livelink system. The system also tracks mechanical status of the equipment, logs running time, and flags when maintenance can and should be scheduled to keep the expensive gear running.

JCB isn’t the only construction equipment manufacturer doing this. I worked with John Deere nearly a decade ago on a similar program they had introduced for their equipment. Whether they work for Amazon building Kindle book readers or for JCB building backhoes, connected devices made possible by an ubiquitous Anywhere Network is an idea that is captivating designers. The big challenge is finding common ground with the network operators for that connectivity and agreeing to business models that build the network cost into the device.

Now the skeptics out there might argue that finding this type of business model common ground with network operators is about as likely as making a JCB backhoe dance. To those skeptics, I offer this linked YouTube video of the JCB Dancing Diggers. They may not be fast, but they do dance.