The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up entirely new markets for mobile connectivity, and in doing so is reshaping the mobile industry ecosystem...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up entirely new markets for mobile connectivity, and in doing so is reshaping the mobile industry ecosystem almost from scratch. From mobile phones, tablets and a handful of other gadgets mostly focused on consumer markets, demand for mobile services is now coming from dozens of different industry verticals, for hundreds of different purposes - everything from automated smart appliances in our homes to industrial machinery, connected vehicles and self-driving drones to monitoring systems in agriculture, healthcare, utilities and more.
It is a truly massive economic opportunity for the mobile industry and beyond. By 2025, it is predicted that there will be 25.2 billion connected devices in circulation. With all of them relying on mobile networks to stay on line, the mobile industry will be contributing close to $5 trillion in economic value - almost 5% of global GDP.
The catch is how the mobile industry embraces this opportunity and provides for all these new connections across so many new devices. The emergence of 5G, with the massive increases in network capacity and speed it will bring, will certainly help. But that does not resolve another, perhaps more fundamental challenge - how to provision, authenticate and manage network access for the mass deployment of billions of new devices when traditional mobile ecosystems have been based on a one-connection-per-user model.
This is where embedded SIM, or e-SIM, comes in. To many analysts and observers, the switch from a removable SIM card to a user identification module hard-wired into a device, and with it the switch from manual to digital service provisioning (i.e. connecting remotely over the airwaves to a network service, rather than having to install a new chip) has transformational potential for IoT. By 2025, it is estimated that e-SIM will be present in two billion devices, with the proportion of total connections expected to rise steadily.
In this paper, we will unpick why e-SIM is seen to be such a game-changer for IoT, before looking closer at the size and nature of the opportunity it presents to mobile operators, device OEMs and IoT service providers, and finally assessing some of the challenges that lie ahead.
