Is Global Cellular IoT Ready for the Made‑for‑IoT Era?

A new buzz around telecoms was visible at this year’s MWC Barcelona as mobile operators
relish AI workloads, low latency use cases that demand 5G performance and the promise of new
profits and partnerships. IoT connectivity is a big part of the enthusiasm but operators haven’t
kept up with the demands of the market and others have innovated to fill the gaps and deliver
simple, global cellular IoT connectivity, writes George Malim.

IoT Now set the tone in our MWC issue with our cover story on how Eseye and AT&T are collaborating to support AT&T’s global customers with a new premium offering, called AT&T Global SIM Advanced. That offering combines Eseye’s AnyNet eSIM and its Infinity connectivity management platform (CMP) to enable orchestration of devices across the globe. This fully managed multi-IMSI eSIM solution has been designed to give customers reliable, secure global connectivity beyond permanent roaming when necessary.

“Having a single eSIM means OEMs with multiple regional or national variants can create devices that can connect to any mobile network, anywhere,” explained Nick Earle, the chief executive of Eseye, in that article. “This allows them to have a single, global product, with a single SKU number rather than having to have multiple regional and national variants. The complexity of managing the production line, supply chain, warehousing and distribution of multiple variants of the same product has a far greater cost than any mobile connectivity so being able to unify variants into a single product has massive economic advantages for the operator.”

The Eseye and AT&T collaboration is just one example of how even the largest mobile network operators are partnering to ensure high-quality coverage anywhere in the world can be achieved for IoT devices. There’s a recognition that the traditional approach of stitching together global cellular connectivity from a lead operator’s own networks and those of its preferred partners results in enormous management complexity, a poor user experience and lack of flexibility for IoT use cases.

Other specialists, such as Aeris which was at MWC fresh from completing its integration of the Ericsson IoT business, are also enabling lower friction global cellular connectivity. The company currently serves 100 million devices in 190 countries on its platform and 100 petabytes traverse the Aeris network. New chief executive, Aziz Benmalek, who joined in January, sees Aeris making global connectivity simpler for both large and small enterprises, adding a range of value-added services on top of the connectivity itself.

Sophisticated simplification

Aeris enables enterprises with a wide range of connectivity choices enabling them to go to any of Aeris’s carrier partners and also bring their own network so they can combine these into a global network with a flexible commercial model. “This is a very important point because when you look at IoT specifically it is complex to make that happen,” says Benmalek. “Given the scale we have today, we’re moving the complexity out and enabling simplification.”

“This is all about a much deeper go-to-market engagement as well as a richer partner ecosystem,” he adds. “With eSIM and the market dynamics the timing is very exciting and we’re well-positioned. Value added services and security are key differentiators.”

floLIVE in contrast has built its own global IoT core network that allows it to constantly introduce new services and offerings over its in-house platform. In addition, to the global network, floLIVE offers a portfolio of capabilities that extend from the core network through to SIM management, a real-time multi-tier billing engine and its own CMP. Being present in global markets means complex regulatory environments which ban permanent roaming such as Brazil or Turkey can be served more easily.

“The way our network is designed is for very long term use but a lot of what is being discussed is a patch solution that you can’t control,” says Roni Cohen, the co-founder and head of business development at floLIVE. “The customer is becoming more sophisticated. Mid-size enterprises have outpaced the MNOs in their requirements and are the driving force behind the innovation.”

“Compliance requirements have never been higher but compliance just doesn’t work in roaming or in medical, financial or transport,” he adds. “The moment you associate an individual with their data you can’t transmit across a border whether that’s black box in a truck or a medical device.”

Beyond the classic operator-based ecosystem

None of these companies see themselves as being in competition with mobile network operators. Instead, they see themselves as enablers of additional revenues for mobile operators who can now generate revenue from IoT customers in ways that previously would have been impossible. In many ways, these are classic ecosystem plays in which an operator that has a customer based in its home market can utilise its network infrastructure, where available to support that customer, and turn to an IoT specialist to provide optimised global connectivity without friction where it doesn’t.

The operational features, from SIM services to billing, reporting and device management are essentially the cherries on top of the connectivity trifle. The specialist IoT communicators are happy to white label their offerings, if required. However, the operators should also be aware that these organisations do go direct to market and serve some of the world’s largest corporations on their own account. Mobile operators appear to be taking a mature approach to this level of co-opetition and supporting development of an innovative and highly-productive ecosystem around global cellular IoT connectivity.

“We’re building networks for all the mobile operators around the world and there is no significant operator that we are not involved with,” confirms Cohen. “There is no network that doesn’t need a solution from outside of their geographic area. For example, if you’re a mobile operator in the US and your customer is a US automaker, you can’t guarantee latency in Australia or Africa and that means you can’t satisfy the connectivity requirements of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or an infotainment system. If operators don’t partner with someone like us, that business will never be theirs. That partnership used to be focused on the roaming agreements between mobile network operators but you can’t sign a 20-year roaming agreement in support of a vehicle’s connectivity.”

FOMO for operators

That fear of missing out is an important driver for mobile operators. Being unable to provide service or more likely only able to provide a sub-optimal service in a customer’s market means that customers will find a local provider with whom to transact directly. As Cohen points out, that means no revenue and the potential to lose a customer to a rival that can also offer service in their home market. The thinking goes that it’s far better for both customer and operator to ensure they have the correct partners to deliver an
optimal global service.

Aeris takes a different approach, preferring to partner with operators to ensure its global portfolio has all the attributes customers need. “Our strategy is for continued operational excellence and scale from infrastructure and operations,” explains Benmalek. “We operate with 30 operators and networks on a global level and look to extend our platform view with Aeris IoT Accelerator as the platform of choice for extended geographies and scalability with a service level agreement (SLA) at enterprise-grade level.”

“We continue to innovate with platform innovation extensions and new features across the user interface and user experience, and through a single pane of glass with value-added services on top such as our IoT Watchtower,” he adds. “You’ll see us continue to innovate with more use cases and services based on the value of the data we have and also with machine learning and artificial intelligence at the platform level.”

Made-for-IoT innovations

With significant traction in terms of increased volumes of cellular IoT devices and the lowering of previous barriers thanks to embedded and integrated SIMs (eSIM and iSIM), the IoT connectivity market has reached a new level of maturity. It has taken approximately 20 years, but with the introduction of the SGP.32 3GPP standard, set to be completed later this year, IoT finally has a made-for-IoT standard. This means the industry will no longer have to force-fit its connectivity needs to a landscape designed for consumer mobile users.

Greater familiarity with the use cases, a more mature ecosystem for IoT connectivity, which encompasses not only the mobile networks, and a slew of automation and simplification technologies sets the scene for a new era in IoT connectivity.

“It looks like we’re passing a significant crossroads for the mobile network operators who are [looking to work] either outside or inside of their footprints,” says Cohen. “We’re seeing mobile network operators growing significantly on our network and they are supporting large enterprise customers in-country using our infrastructure. We power a significant number of other service providers and we have seen a very big ripple effect in what happens to end customers. We’re seeing very demanding enterprise customers who have come to an understanding that they need a lot more than one mobile network operator can offer.”

Will 6G avoid the mistakes of 5G for simplified device connectivity?

5G has been a technology in search of a use case and that’s probably been a blessing in disguise
because few operators have been able to support the needs of advanced use cases. AI workloads,
network slices for specific communications tasks and the ultra-low latency demands of a growing
array of IoT applications were not designed-in to 5G from the start and mobile operators’ systems
are not constructed with these offerings in mind. 6G, which is still over the horizon, is set to
address these issues and careful planning has been put in place.

“In 5G we gave too many options for vendors and operators so they struggled to get it right for
vertical industries and for the proliferation of connected things,” says Rajesh Pankah, the executive
vice president and chief technology officer at Interdigital, a global research and development
company focused primarily on wireless, video, artificial intelligence and related technologies.
“The strategy going into 6G now is how do you build the fundamental platform for a device that
needs to connect. That involves coverage capacity and low latency and, once you have the basic
requirements laid out, you can scale up. This is about what the device can do.”

That device focus for 6G will be refreshing given that it’s likely to be the high-speed, high capacity
use cases of devices – rather than consumers – that drive 6G demand. “In the 6G world, there will
be data as-a-service and AI as-a-service along with network as-a-service so the framework put in
place by 3GPP standards is designed to enable that,” confirms Pankah.

“The big lesson that has been learned from the 5G framework is that it tried to work with all the
implications from different verticals to build a system that had all those different options,” he
adds. “It’s better to build a platform that’s adaptable. We don’t want to specify how an app will be
built but just to say: here’s everything that will be available to you, go and build and monetise and
commercialise.”

The author is George Malim, the managing editor of IoT Now.

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