International Carriers’ Path to The IoT Gold Mine

By | September 8, 2015

Wholesale IoT OpportunityThe following excerpts are from a paper we recently published in collaboration with Hot Telecom on the business opportunity for wholesalers in IoT. Here, I capture the opportunity for the enterprise and transport sectors, but we also address the consumer sector. You can download the paper at this link to begin exploring recommendations for international wholesale carriers.

Opportunities in Enterprises

Providing services to Enterprises of all types and complexity is one of the key opportunities. International carriers can leverage their existing relationships and local presence to provide a multinational service platform offering a number of applications in the industrial and commercial sectors. For instance, multi-national corporations will require solutions to help them manage:

  • Automotives– both maintenance, service and safety related as well as user applications enabled by the manufacturer
  • Industrial machinery and production systems monitoring and repair management
  • Agriculture sector where autonomous farm machinery is already being deployed and requires accurate positioning and advanced data collection to optimize food production
  • Asset tracking across the entire supply chain
  • Power and Energy infrastructure with high demands on safety as well as minimizing diversion of supply for fraudulent or illegal purposes
  • Heating, Cooling and HVAC system monitoring and optimization across a regional deployment
  • Mining Operations and the resultant supply chain for minerals and commodities

Opportunities in Transport

There is the transport segment, although this can overlap, in terms of the potential customer base with Enterprises. Transport here includes:

  • Aircraft movement and optimization
  • Shipping, particularly as part of an overall supply chain optimization
  • Ferries and passenger vessels
  • Trains – both passenger and freight

In the above segments, wholesalers can structure services to improve the value proposition for multinational corporations seeking to connect directly to their products and services to monitor performance, provide preemptive maintenance, reduce truck rolls, improve service levels, and enhance product design and functionality.

Real life examples

The market is at a relatively early stage for implementing such services. Yet, there are two examples that point to what the future may hold.

The first example is the new service by NTT Com that provides secure connectivity for IoT applications enabling corporations, for example, to monitor the operational status of exported machinery and vehicles and manage cross-border supply chains. These companies can now access, operate and manage connections that are not in the home network without having the need to sign multiple service contracts in each operational market.

The second example is an MVNO set up by Panasonic to provide connectivity to its business devices, such as a monitoring camera or a heating and cooling system. The service includes secure cloud storage for user data such as video.

These examples highlight the different opportunities where wholesale operators can play an important role in enabling IoT applications through a comprehensive service offering that includes connectivity, transport, cloud hosting and data analytic services that bridge different markets in a global marketplace.