Having spent a lot of time with MVNOs and IoT connectivity businesses, I can see that the conversation has changed over time. A few years ago, most of the discussions held centred around things such as wholesale rates, roaming agreements, launch timelines, and how quickly a new offer could be taken to market. These topics haven’t really changed, but they’re no longer where most of the interesting problems sit.
What has changed is the focus on control.
This isn’t control in the sense of end-to-end infrastructure ownership, because very few organisations do that anymore (think public cloud services), but control over how connectivity behaves, how services evolve, and where value is created as a business scales. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as the market moves into maturity.
Connectivity on Its Own Isn’t Enough
There was a time where simply being able to offer connectivity at the right price was enough to build an MVNO or IoT business. Those were the days! Demand was expanding quickly and enterprises were still working out how connected services fitted into their operations, some doing it well, and others… not so well. If you could provide a bit of reliable access and decent coverage, then the rest was plain sailing.
The reality today is vastly different. Connectivity has become a commodity. Enterprises assume global reach, resilience, and flexibility as standard, rather than something they should pay a premium for. At the same time, competition has increased and margins have shrunk, and the expectation is that they will continue to do so.
This creates a fairly simple question for operators and service providers, “If connectivity itself is no longer the differentiator, then what is?”
In most cases, the answer sits somewhere above or alongside the access layer rather than within it.
Architecture Has Become a Commercial Conversation
One of the more interesting developments in recent years is how technical decisions have started to impact commercial considerations more directly. Considerations such as routing, policy control, and where traffic exits the network used to be engineering discussions, and ones that were taken amongst the internal team – often following the path of least resistance. Increasingly, they determine whether a new service can be launched quickly or whether a customer requirement becomes a long-term project.
Enterprises rarely describe their needs in network terms. They talk about outcomes — performance, compliance, reliability, operational simplicity etc… – often, all of the above. A payment terminal, a vehicle, and an environmental sensor all have very different requirements, even though from a connectivity perspective they might appear similar.
Treating all traffic the same keeps networks simple, but it also removes opportunities for differentiation and monetisation, and in some cases, it just doesn’t work for the enterprise use case. Operators that recognise this early tend to find themselves having different conversations with customers. Connectivity becomes part of a broader service rather than the entire offer.
Distribution and Local Control
There’s also been a noticeable shift towards more distributed approaches to connectivity. This is often described as being a mechanism to fix a latency issue, but in practice it’s just as frequently driven by regulation or operational considerations.
This is becoming especially pertinent given recent legislation such as NIS2 enacted across the European Union, which impacts specific organisations categorised as “essential” or “important”. Here security, and in particular “control” becomes more of a major consideration.
Enterprises operating across multiple countries increasingly need certainty about where their data goes and where it leaves the network. Sometimes this is a legal requirement. Sometimes it’s about risk management or performance consistency. Either way, there is an expectation that connectivity adapts to the application rather than the application adapting to the network.
For MVNOs and IoT providers, flexibility here becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Being able to introduce new routing models or service layers without redesigning everything underneath allows operators to respond much faster to customer needs. Commercially, that speed matters. Often the difference between winning and losing an opportunity comes down to how quickly a workable solution can be delivered – we’re now talking a matter of days, not weeks, months, or in some particularly trying scenarios… years. Speed and agility are of the essence!
Security Moving Closer to Connectivity
Security is another area where expectations have shifted. Historically, connectivity providers could assume that security sat elsewhere — in enterprise infrastructure or application layers. That assumption becomes harder to maintain as IoT deployments scale and devices remain in the field for years at a time.
In many cases, devices cannot easily be patched or physically accessed. Visibility into network behaviour therefore becomes increasingly important. Changes in how devices communicate often provide the earliest indication that something isn’t quite right, and control over that communication is vital, whether that’s a security issue or simply an operational fault.
Embedding visibility and control closer to connectivity allows issues to be identified earlier and managed more effectively. It also aligns with the direction regulation is moving, where the capability to demonstrate oversight and accountability are expected, rather than optional.
The Commercial Reality
All of this leads to a fairly straightforward conclusion. The MVNO and IoT markets are no longer in their early growth phase, where things were easy and opportunities flowed like water. As the markets move towards maturity, competing purely on price becomes increasingly difficult. Operators that rely solely on wholesale economics will see margins erode over time.
The alternative is to look at those areas where they can differentiate their offer. This means looking at where control exists within the ecosystem — routing, policy, and service flexibility — and building value in those areas.
When that happens, the customer conversation changes significantly. Instead of selling numbers of SIMs and Megabytes of data, operators start selling reliability, compliance, and/or operational simplicity and visibility. Connectivity becomes the delivery mechanism rather than the product itself.
For New Entrants
For organisations looking to launch an MVNO or IoT business today, the temptation is often to optimise for speed of entry. I can understand that, but it can create issues later. Early architectural decisions tend to define how easily services can evolve once real customer requirements start to emerge.
In my experience, the businesses that succeed in the long term are the ones that think more about flexibility from the outset. In fact, those that think in general more about the “bilities” – flexibility, scalability, adaptability etc.. tend to perform better. Partners should be evaluated not only on cost, but on how much visibility and control they enable. The ability to adapt without major structural change becomes very valuable as the business grows – and ultimately leads to a lower total cost of ownership for the adopted architecture.
Looking Ahead
The industry is gradually moving towards a more software-defined model of connectivity. The reality is that software-based infrastructure running on COTS hardware is easier to deploy, easier to scale, and far less constrained by underlying hardware — both technically and commercially.
As networks continue to disaggregate and enterprise expectations rise, the lines between operator, platform, and service provider will continue to blur.
In that environment, scale alone won’t be enough. Adaptability will matter more. The ability to shape connectivity around customer needs — rather than forcing customers to work around network limitations — is where long-term value will sit.
Connectivity itself remains fundamental. Increasingly, though, differentiation comes from how intelligently it is delivered and controlled, and how effectively it enables the services built on top of it.
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