IoT Frustrations? How to Understand Barriers and Improve Solution Performance

IoT promises to revolutionise industries, create new efficiencies, lower costs, and drive new product offerings. However, many organisations find that the reality of maintaining IoT initiatives can be much more challenging than expected.

Are you running into any of these frustrations with your IoT solutions?

• Your devices struggle to consistently deliver data
• Your devices don’t work at all or incur high roaming costs when traveling in some regions
• Your wireless network provider is discontinuing the service used by your IoT device

Understanding Key Points of Failure

These IoT challenges are related to wireless connectivity, or more specifically the problems that arise because IoT devices are tied to a just a single network connection. Here’s how: Your devices can lose contact with servers in spotty coverage areas or when traveling outside your network provider’s coverage area. Roaming costs are incurred when your device utilises another network provider, making connectivity costly thus increasing your cost of doing business. And if your network carrier is discontinuing, or “sunsetting” your service type (i.e. 2G, 3G, etc.), the connectivity will end entirely and your device will become inactive.

To solve these connectivity challenges, you also need to know about a small chip – called a SIM - that sits inside your IoT device. SIMs, or more formally Subscriber Identity Modules – are used by network cellular carriers to identify and authenticate your devices. These SIMs also, unfortunately, lock you into that single network and technology. This is a key to your connectivity challenges, since that network may not cover you in every area, which creates inconsistent data transmission issues or bumps your device to expensive roaming options. This single-use SIM will also render your device entirely useless someday when your network provider sunsets your technology. If you’re on a 2G or 3G network, your days may be more numbered than you realise.

The Solution: Multi-Carrier Connectivity

Even if your devices are on a new LTE band, such as the IoT-friendly low-power options, the SIM inside each unit still limits you to a single carrier, and it still gets expensive when accessing other networks. Again, its greatest limitation is that it only works on one network.

The good news is that an emerging connectivity technology can eliminate all of these challenges by allowing your device to move to alternate networks or bands whenever needed. The eUICC SIM, or “eSIM” for short, can host multiple carrier profiles and is universally compatible with any cellular carrier or technology, from 2G through LTE. This means no more sunset issues. These solutions also support your devices to switch between carriers, solving the problems of spotty connectivity, MIA devices, and outrageous roaming charges.

And while eSIM is still new, the International Telecommunications Union report predicted that by 2020, close to one billion mobile and IoT devices will be shipped with eSIM technologies each year.

Exploring the Benefits of eSIM

In the next several blogs, we’ll take a deeper look into eSIM technology, explore successful eSIM use-cases and walk you through an eSIM readiness assessment for your business. By following along, you’ll learn how to use eSIMs to solve the connectivity-related business challenges.

To learn more about the business benefits eSIM right now, download our guide titled “eSIM 101: An Introduction to eSIM for IoT.”