Navigating the Shifting Sands of IoT Connectivity

Until recently, many IoT MVNOs found competitive differentiation in their technical capabilities to address enterprise and OEM pain points that MNOs were largely unable to address. Within their own domestic markets, MNOs may not have been be able to secure national IoT roaming agreements. Meanwhile, on an international level, a heavy focus on roaming-first, best-efforts connectivity models meant that addressing sophisticated enterprise requirements and emerging regulations surrounding permanent roaming created unnecessary complexity from an end-customer perspective. Advanced IoT MVNOs, on the other hand, leveraged eSIM coupled with multi-IMSI capabilities to deliver multi-network roaming or localised ‘permanent roaming safe’ solutions, bringing enterprise customers closer to the thus-far elusive ‘single SKU’ concept.

eSIM & Single-Pane-of-Glass Bring Disruption

This paradigm is now seeing significant disruption. In the first instance, the emergence of the eSIM IoT specification (SGP.32) opens new possibilities for how eSIM provisioning and orchestration are addressed, enabling a new competitive market beyond what was possible during the eSIM M2M specification (SGP.02) era. In parallel, MNOs, in particular, are increasingly embracing the concept of SPoG (Single Pane of Glass). In this context, the management and orchestration of eSIMs (or SIMs) provisioned across various core networks and connectivity management platforms is abstracted and normalised via the primary connectivity provider’s platform, reducing the need for ‘swivel chair’ mechanics and providing a more seamless approach to managing distributed estates. Here, the ability to maintain the billing relationship is desirable, while the potential to monetise platform and orchestration fees offers incremental revenue opportunities.

Nevertheless, not all integrations are equal. Many SPoG solutions are simply overlays of other platforms, thus normalising to a lowest common denominator of APIs for retrieving SIM information and providing limited lifecycle management capabilities. Very few players today are providing real differentiation in advanced features for connectivity optimisation and capabilities to address emerging regulatory, security, and policy requirements – all notable factors in many IoT verticals where connectivity is international in nature.

Maintaining Strategic Differentiation

The market is entering a critical phase where MVNOs must decide on how they approach IoT customers. This is particularly pressing for those aiming to serve customers with multi-country operations and connection volumes in the thousands, where streamlined management, abstraction from complexity, and high availability are crucial.
 

• Multi-IMSI remains a competitive advantage for IoT MVNOs, as long as the underlying technology and infrastructure are optimised for it.
  Traditional MNO core networks or billing systems have not been designed for multi-IMSI usage, yet multi-IMSI capable of being managed over-the-air offers a more streamlined and dynamic mechanism of optimising connectivity when compared to eSIM. The coupling of eSIM and multi-IMSI offers customers the most flexible tool for network selection, and provides freedom from lock-in, as long as the eIM association can be reconfigured. It is undeniable that eSIM (SGP.32) will become key for IoT connectivity – by the end of the decade, more than half of all new cellular IoT connections will utilise eSIM, up from around 20% last year. IoT MVNOs should thus leverage a highly flexible toolset in the form of multi-IMSI profiles in conjunction with eSIM, and apply first-party differentiation in terms of the orchestration layer that is independent of the SIM technology.

• Connectivity orchestration today is often rather crude, with rulesets largely based on data threshold limits.
  The fact is that the necessary and timely data to deliver beyond this is often lacking, but timely, available data is exactly what is needed to provide orchestration that meets the requirements of businesses with modestly complex IoT deployments that require flexible policy management and compliance.

• The core network and packet gateway infrastructure, in terms of in-house efforts or supplier partnerships, will therefore become fundamental.
  Real-time asset visibility and control is not only a requirement for security and regulatory compliance, but will become a factor as enterprises look to implement AI workloads into their IoT programmes. Meanwhile, the underlying data and the understanding of business requirements and device contexts should be leveraged to differentiate connectivity orchestration. Above all, it should be understood that observability is the result of deep integration with a partner’s core, or the ability to host the IMSI or profile on one’s own core, and both should be prioritised over SPoG overlay approaches.

• Connectivity is no longer simply concerned with the sale of Megabytes and Gigabytes.
  Today’s market landscape continues to drive margins down, while the combined forces of regulation, enterprise sophistication, and growing competitiveness enabled by eSIM and SPoG mean a pure data resell business will only see niche success. Providers that can shift the conversation away from ‘how cheap can you sell me airtime’ to ‘what value can your solution bring my organisation’ will be the key players of tomorrow, and this requires a shift away from a dumb pipe to a network based on real-time, intelligent connectivity orchestration.