Smart companies are building new business models leveraging trends such as M2M which is simply the direct communication between objects and systems without the need for human intervention.
The end result is a cellular network that supports billions of objects and provides unprecedented low pricing, low energy consumption and long range communication.
Infra-red communication suffers the same problems, but has the additional limitation of requiring a direct line of sight between objects as anyone who has tried to operate a television remote control with someone else standing between him and the television will know.