Traditional connectivity services for smartphones are designed for human communicaton patterns. And while people have different communication behaviors, their use-cases are very similar and millions of customers can be served with few pricing models and network configurations.

Connectivity for IoT devices differs strongly between the many IoT use cases. A smart meter transmits a few bytes once a day, stays in one location and is being used for decades. While a GPS-based asset tracking system may send data every minute and travel around the world with an upredictable lifecycle that can last few days or many years.

As IoT is being adopted by virutally every industry, the number of use-cases is increasing and every customer may require a different pricing model and technical configuration.

Customers for IoT connectivity are service providers themselves, manufacturers of connected products or IoT solution providers. Connectivity is a part of their service offerings and a mission critical element in their supply chain. They require significantly higher service levels and tools to efficiently manage and operate their connected devices.

Such IoT Customers often operate in more than one country, while MNOs have been optimised to operate in each local market. IoT supply chains can be complex with centralized manufacturing in one country and deployment in many other markets. Many IoT products have a lifecycle that demands switching between different network providers in different countries. Mission critical applications even require multiple networks within one country to assure coverage in any situation.

That’s why IoT Connectivity Management needs to accommodate that global nature of the IoT business.