A lot of attention is being paid to whether AT&T is actually the largest mobile carrier in the U.S. now (it isn’t), but I’m more interested in the news that the operator added two million non-phone connections in the fourth quarter. That figure includes laptops, tablets and netbooks, but it also includes the M2M kind of connections that are the heart of the growing Internet of Things era. Perhaps more than any other U.S. carrier, AT&T has gotten out front of that space and is playing a leading role by forging alliances with manufacturers and service providers from other (read: non-mobile) industries. That vision should serve the carrier very well as M2M begins to take off and 4G networks come online.