As industries shift to digitised services by adopting IoT (Internet of things), the demand for seamless, low-latency connectivity is growing, but for many international firms, these solutions need to be operable worldwide – a major challenge for telecom providers.
Traditionally, a telecoms operator would manage a global portfolio of connected devices through roaming – allowing connected things, such as cars, to connect to another operators’ network if they go outside of locations where their primary provider operates.
Most of us have experienced roaming at some point – whether it be on holidays or business trips, landing in another country initiates an alert that warns us we will be connecting to a local provider partner, and this sometimes comes with increased costs. In fact, just a few years back, roaming was seen as a dirty word, as consumers were often hit with massive charges for using their devices while abroad.
Though huge telcos such as AT&T continue to maintain roaming agreements with partners across the globe, the traditional model is becoming “increasingly inefficient” for businesses, explains AT&T VP of product development, IoT, Mike Van Horn.
“Over time, customer needs have evolved,” he tells TechInformed during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“Customers now need to have a single skew SIM that can work anywhere in the world, regardless of whether their device has performance requirements, or if the particular use case requires low latency. This also applies in highly regulated countries – 99% connectivity just isn’t good enough.”
He points to industries such as healthcare, critical infrastructure, manufacturing and logistics as sectors where businesses are seeing much more complex, yet vital connectivity demands.
One of the challenges, he adds, is that these demands do not just apply to large-scale enterprises, who might be able to afford to pay significant roaming costs, but also to smaller operations, who still want global IoT reach.
“We’ve been able to do that on one-off scenarios for some of our largest customers. But really big firms have teams of people that manage telco contracts and telco bills, but the vast majority don’t want to do that. That’s just been a necessary evil for them.”
Eseye does it
As is often the case, technology has opened new opportunities, and advances in eSIMS are helping make global roaming much easier for businesses of all sizes, says van Horn.
For example, AT&T recently partnered with IoT connectivity firm Eseye to launch a global roaming ESIM for its IoT customers. The Global SIM Advanced uses Eseye’s AnyNet eSIM and Infinity platform to offer orchestration and automation solutions for enterprises sending devices across multiple territories.
It uses an AT&T IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) to identify the user profile, but the GSA can then store up to nine additional network profiles on one SIM, allowing it to switch between different networks, while updating the localised profile using over-the-air technology.
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This, explains Van Horn, means users can stay connected wherever they travel by connecting to the best available network, instead of data being sent back to AT&T to confirm the identity of the user on its own servers, cutting down on latency.
Van Horn says there are two main drivers behind the partnership.
“Firstly, we saw increasing demand from customers of all sizes, looking to be able to localise in different places,” explains Van Horn.
“We’ve also been on our own journey with interconnects and creating the ability to localise in different places, and this has helped us learn a lot about standing up local entities and special licenses.”
This, he adds, can become cost and resource-prohibitive for many enterprises, who still need the ability to operate in multiple countries, but might not be able to pay the additional cost that AT&T or other telcos would need to charge to provide localised connectivity there.
“Your customers still want it, so you have to find a way of delivering it,” he adds. This, he explains, led them to Eseye, which already partners with Canadian telecoms firm Telus and pan-African operator MTN. During those discussions, AT&T also found that Eseye was already providing solutions to some of the American telco’s larger enterprise customers.
“When we talk about getting as close to 100% connectivity worldwide as humanly possible, we thought they were the best partner to bring the assets to enable us to achieve that.”
SIMple solution
AT&T Business manages over 140 million connected devices worldwide, making it one of the largest IoT connectivity providers in the world. It supports everything from 60 of the top US automotive brands to several healthcare startups.
The operator already has IoT roaming partnerships with major operators across the world, from KPN in the Netherlands, to Orange, Swisscom, Vodafone and more, after agreeing on a deal last year to enable LTE-M (4G for machines) roaming across their networks. LTE-M, which is a low power wide area IoT solution, is another part of the telco’s approach to global roaming, says Van Horn.
“The number of connections continues to grow significantly on our base in the industry at large, the types of customers we’re starting to see small and medium startups that are building IoT-enabled devices entering global markets that five years ago, you wouldn’t have seen.”
The biggest sectors driving global IoT roaming are automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector, he adds.
One example he offers is the FirstNet network, which is a public safety broadband network that runs across the US. Calls for a nationwide broadband system came after 9/11, with AT&T joining a public-private partnership with the FirstNet agency in 2017. The initial build-out was completed in March 2023.
“Because AT&T powers the FirstNet network,” he adds, “We have a tonne of IoT devices operating in the public sector space. And for them, reliability and low latency can be vital to use the tools they need to help save lives.”
Van Horn concludes by saying that eSIMs are helping to unlock new opportunities for enterprises looking to operate across borders.
“What is exciting me the most is that I see a path to global, seamless connectivity,” he concludes. “There’s nothing simple about what we do day today, even though a SIM card may look like a very simple piece of plastic, but that is going to unlock that huge growth in IoT devices. Because once you make it simple and you make it cost-effective and it’s efficient from an operations standpoint, then the sky’s the limit.”
