The world’s population is 7.7bn people and that’s the total addressable market for providing mobile or fixed connections to human customers. It’s a big market and it focuses on relatively high value services with at least reasonable margins per month. That margin availability underpins the ability to sell to, configure and bring customers on-board in processes that involve only partial automation.
In the IoT, it’s different. Devices or sensors, which will number in the tens of billions, may only generate a few cents a month in connectivity revenue so the concept of mailing out SIM cards and administering a bill for each connections is more costly than the business case for most services can bear.
Fortunately, IoT connections are not cellphone customers. They’re machines that can be deployed with SIMs embedded, by fully-automated systems and at sustainable pricepoints to support IoT apps from mission critical healthcare apps to simple sensors that alert when a rubbish bin is full.
Executive insights from 1NCE CSO Alexander Bufalino
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