The Next Wave of IoT: Unpacking eSIM Orchestration

The next wave of IoT connectivity is here. Enter eSIM orchestration.

In this episode, Eseye Executive Chairman Nick Earle is joined for a third time by Matt Hatton, Founding Partner and Analyst of Transforma Insights, to explore the market forces driving this shift.

The rise of eSIM technology specifications like SGP.32 offers more flexibility, but it also brings greater fragmentation. Enterprises now face a tangled web of regulations, latency constraints, and diverging network standards across the globe.

That’s where eSIM orchestration comes in. Matt explains why a new orchestration layer is emerging—not just to simplify profile management, but to unify billing, compliance, and connectivity in a single managed service. Without it, global IoT remains a patchwork of complexity and compromise.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. What’s driving the shift from roaming to eSIM orchestration
2. Why eSIM orchestration fills the gap between flexibility and reality
3. What it takes to deliver true global IoT at scale

Whether you’re in telecoms, product development, or enterprise IoT strategy, this episode offers a clear view into what’s changing, why it matters, and how eSIM orchestration might be the missing piece.

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eSIM Orchestration: Driving the Next Wave of IoT Connectivity Position Paper

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DALLAS/BARCELONA, March 3, 2025 An eSIM solution for customers desiring the enhanced, lower latency connectivity that localization can offer. Powered by an advanced Connectivity Management Platform tailor made for eSIM orchestration and embedded advanced automation rules for operational efficiency. Key Takeaways:  AT&T has unveiled Global SIM Advanced (GSA), a cutting-edge multi-profile eSIM solution complementary to…

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Transcript

Intro:
You are listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, lessons learned, success stories, and innovation strategies that work.

Nick Earle: Hi, this is Nick Earle from Eseye, and you are listening to IoT Leaders. Once again, I have Matt Hatton, the Co-Founder of industry analyst firm Transforma Insights, viewed by many as one of, if not the leading expert on IoT connectivity. And this is a pretty important one. It is an overview of a major piece of research, a major whitepaper that’s available on our website, eseye.com, called “eSIM Orchestration: Driving the Next Wave of IoT Connectivity.”

Matt goes through all the background to it, including the historical background, and essentially talks about how IoT is complex and that complexity is getting bigger. And then we’re going to go into multi-RAT. It’s going to get even more complex. It’s almost like the big bang.

Everything is not only expanding, but also accelerating as it expands. And then he talks about what’s happening in the background for convergence and the tension between standards like SGP.32, the tension between the convergence forces and the divergence forces? The answer to that is a new role, a new capability called eSIM orchestration, and it really drives the heart of our strategy, which is why we commissioned the whitepaper. So, without any further setup, let’s get going with my third or fourth chat with Matt Hatton, but I know he’s a very popular guest. Matt Hatton of Transforma Insights talking about eSIM orchestration. Enjoy.

Hello Matt, and welcome again to the IoT Leaders podcast.

Matt Hatton: Thank you very much, Nick. It’s a pleasure to be back again.

Nick Earle: You know, I was trying to think you’re definitely the most frequent guest on the podcast. I can’t remember whether this is your third or even fourth, do you keep record?

Matt Hatton: It’s at least three, I’m going to say, but I couldn’t say for certain whether it was three or four.

Nick Earle: Okay. It’s one of the two.

Matt Hatton: And I think maybe it’s because I’m only just down the road, but obviously everything’s done virtually. So, where I’m based in the world, the fact that I’m only an hour’s drive from where you are is neither here nor there.

Nick Earle: Yeah, no, it’s definitely not to do with proximity, but what it is to do with is a very important report that you’ve worked on and just for the listeners and the viewers: the subject of this week’s podcast is about eSIM orchestration. There’s a whitepaper which goes into more detail than Matt and I are going to go through in the next forty or so minutes. It’s on our website and it’s called “eSIM Orchestration: Driving the Next Wave of IoT Connectivity.”

Matt, I think it’s a good place to start. First of all, in case there are people who haven’t listened to your previous appearances, this might be number four. Maybe just two things.

A very brief intro of yourself. Who are you? And secondly, this whitepaper is a follow on to something you were predicting last year because in November 2024, your company Transforma Insights, you were unveiling your predictions or transition topics as you call them for 2025 and in particular to do with SGP.32 and some of the things that we’ll talk about. This area of eSIM orchestration was something that you were predicting and now in this new report you’ve gone into much more detail. So maybe a very brief intro and then an overview of what we’re going to be talking about today.

Matt Hatton: I’m one of the founding partners here at Transforma Insights. We are a boutique research consulting firm focused predominantly on IoT. We do a little bit around some other disruptive technologies that are IoT adjacent, so AI and edge computing there. A few other things, but the thing that tends to occupy my time is things to do with connectivity, things to do with cellular connectivity.

So, anything related to what mobile network operators are doing, what mobile virtual network operators are doing, things to do with the underlying supporting middleware or the networks, the devices. And one of the interesting areas in there that has been sort of bubbling along for quite a while, and I’m sure we’ll get on to the timing piece in a bit, is what’s known as SGP.32. But let me take a step back a second. As you mentioned, we came up with a list back in November 2024 of what we thought our transition topics would be for 2025.

A series of things, there were ten or twelve, I can’t remember now, maybe it was ten, that we identified as being the key things that we thought would be influencing the IoT space and with a particular focus on the connectivity space within the present year. And there were a bunch of things in there, to do with satellite and 5G and middleware platforms and a few other things. But one of them was around eSIM orchestration and specifically the arrival of SGP.32, the new standard for managing eSIMs.

And what we were suggesting was that this would create quite a change for the market. You’d see the emergence of a few new roles in the market, one specifically being what we term the eSIM orchestrator. An organisation that’s not necessarily a specific organisation but it’s kind of a role that a number of different organisations could fulfil that is to do with managing the connectivity on behalf of an enterprise customer in this new SGP.32 environment.

I could keep on going Nick.

Nick Earle: Let’s leave it there because it’s continuity from what you had said previously. So, it’s not a certain thing you’ve just said. It’s continuity. We do have a lot to cover.

So, let’s try and break it into four or five logical blocks. The first block we wanted to start on is, I know what I’m asked a lot is that when people are, there’s so many different solutions in IoT to choose from, claims and counterclaims, and there’s price versus value. But I always say, let’s take a step back and look at the changes in the overall IoT landscape because I don’t think we’ve quite seen this level of disruption. Certainly, I’ve been over seven years now at Eseye and I’ve never seen a time with this much change disruption going on.

So maybe you could recap from your perspective as a leading analyst in IoT, the key changes in the landscape for cellular based IoT connectivity that you see.

Matt Hatton: This could take some time, Nick. But as you say, I could fill up several hours’ worth. It’s probably the most transformational time for cellular based IoT connectivity that I think we’ve ever seen going back to 2009-2010 sort of time. It’s been quite a rollercoaster at the moment, but we can flag up a few things.

One is the introduction of this new SGP.32 standard. I mentioned it, it’s a GSM Association standard. It comes on the back of there being a couple of other existing standards, the M2M and consumer standards, were launched in 2014 and 2016, respectively. And SGP.32 is designed specifically for IoT and this provides a lot more freedom for enterprises to bring their own connectivity, switch between network operators should they choose to and there’s a whole lot of functionality in there which is sort of frees up the whole market, makes it a little bit more easier to make the decisions about supporting different networks on a particular device.

Nick Earle: And if I can jump in just because we know that we have a lot of listeners now because we’ve been going for almost four years on the podcast series and we have different levels of knowledge of those listeners. Just for those people who might think are not quite sure what Matt’s referring to, essentially for thirty, forty years, the mobile network operator landscape has been having proprietary IMSIs, the code that says which network your SIM card connects to. And the SGP.32 standard is the one that enables multi-IMSIs, it enables the agnostic SIM, which is a piece of the jigsaw of the holy grail, which we’ll come onto. Because then for the first time you can have a SIM that can connect to multiple operators as opposed to just relying on an operator plus roaming agreement. It is a very key building block from a user perspective in having operator choice in a SIM and it is delivered through the eSIM technology.

Matt Hatton: Absolutely. And there are shades of grey with this, of course, in terms of some of the standards have allowed this a little bit and given you some freedom to do that and there have always been options for switching between IMSIs on a given SIM, but this is another degree of flexibility in terms of how those devices are connected. The principle being that you as an enterprise customer with a load of deployed SIMs using this technology have the ability to switch between networks in a simpler way.

Why do you need that?

That really leads me on to topic number two in terms of why things are changing: regulations. Now we’ve always had regulations around IoT connectivity, permanent roaming restrictions. If a device goes into a market, it can’t operate there for more than three months typically without it needing to be a local SIM. So fine if you’re actually roaming, but if you’re expecting that thing to be residing within territory permanently then it’s a bit of a no in certain territories.

Brazil, perfect example, Türkiye doesn’t allow it, China, India, a bunch of other countries. Sometimes its commercial, US operators aren’t particularly keen on it, Australia likewise. But then you’ve also got probably another degree of regulation coming through as well and that’s in the form of national sovereignty, data sovereignty type rules from various territories, EU probably most prominently with the NIS2 regulations, and that’s necessitating much more of a use of local connectivity rather than relying on roaming. It needs to be managed within territory.

Nick Earle: An example of that could be a vending machine from an Eseye point of view. We do a lot of coffee machines, a lot of vending machines where the telemetry data is backhauled, but often the payment data has to stay in country. So, it’s not just even the data has to stay in country. Sometimes it’s the type of data, which means it has to be a localised connection in the country and also the time to process a payment, like in China, to process QR code. You can’t backhaul the data to the UK and back to China because the QR code has, we found out, SGP.32 times back and forth to the payment provider to process a QR code you can do it in one point two seconds. The latency of the data is driving a need for localisation as well.

Matt Hatton: Absolutely, if you’re supporting some form of critical national infrastructure whether that’s smart metering or any number of use cases then there is an increasing requirement for local connectivity as well. So that’s the compliance thing and also hand in hand with that almost, you’ve got more requirement from the customers for guaranteeing that compliance. They’re more aware of compliance related issues and will insist the connectivity supports that. So that’s another factor.

One other, several others I’d point to, but if you think about the network operators and their approach to allowing other companies to access their networks. I talked about permanent roaming a bit but there’s also the question of will mobile network operators be happy with devices roaming onto that? Will they be happy with providing eSIM profiles? What we’ve seen is almost a clamping down on what was previously quite a wild west approach where pretty much anybody could piggyback on anybody’s network and do whatever they felt like to the extent that they were making use of consumer roaming agreements.

What we’ve seen is the network operator putting in place tighter guardrails in terms of monthly recurring charges and being more selective about who they’re working with and putting in place some restrictions on how many connections and which customers they’re allowed to be supported by these others who are bringing connection onto the network. There’s a bit more selectivity from the network operators.

Nick Earle: Excuse me if I can jump in. We talked at the very beginning about SGP.32, it almost always seems the magic solution. We’ve now got interoperability. You spent a lot of time in conferences, and you see these demos, oh look, press a button ding, you’re on operator A, press a button ding, you’re on operator B.

But of course, the moment you go under the water and look at what happened, exactly what you just said, it’s like operators don’t, it’s not a natural reaction of an operator to say, I’m very happy for you to be able to just transfer out to another operator. They do; they can put barriers in place, and the costs can go up. Certainly, what we find when we talk to people is that you have to look at the technical side saying, is it possible under the standard to transfer? Yes, it is.

But in practical terms, will your operator support it and will you able to get the holy grail of a single product SKU globally that will just connect anywhere at any time? There’s a lot of self-interest and a lot of complexity that needs to be, to use my analogy, under the waterline. You’re seeing the iceberg at the top, but underneath there’s a lot more ice as well. And then you’ve the regulator, not just the operators, but the regulators, the data sovereignty and the laws of physics, latency, which I know will bring us on to 5G later on.

Matt Hatton: Yeah, not only that, but there’s also a question of negotiating with a whole stack of these network operators and are you really well placed to do it as an enterprise or to abstract some of that complexity should you be working with a third party? There’s a plethora of different ways in which these relationships can work and it’s getting more and more complicated.

Next thing I had on my mental list was around commoditisation specifically related to SGP.32 things. So, there’s the question of commoditisation the price of cellular based connectivity gets eroded over time it’s a competitive market and lots of companies in that space are looking for ways to differentiate. Increasingly that’s as a connectivity platform managing profiles, handling all of those elements of the ways in which connectivity is delivered. There’s a bit of a commercial expedient to looking for other ways of addressing the opportunity rather than just thinking about reselling connectivity. It’s moving from a connectivity resale market to an extent into being about connectivity platforms.

There’s also a transformation going on in the middleware space. Middleware and those software platform areas are one area that we look at quite a lot.

And in terms of eSIM and remote SIM provisioning is a bit of a driver of a trend within that which is the need for what’s termed a single pane of glass platform to manage across multiple networks, where previously you might avoid all your connectivity from one provider. You could do it with a single platform.

Nick Earle: If you go to ten more operators, you may end up with eleven platforms.

Matt Hatton: Yep. You need one platform to rule them all. Can we term it that?

Nick Earle: Like a Lord of the Rings quote.

Matt Hatton: Something like that. I don’t know how litigious the Tolkien family are if you start referring to something as that. Maybe they’re not too keen. But the principle is you have an abstraction layer sitting above all of this diversity of connectivity and allowing for management across all the various things, which is facilitated by this great flexibility in which networks are available to any given connection.

And then the final one is around diversity of connectivity options. I mentioned it’s never been a more complex space in IoT connectivity than now. That manifests itself most prominently in the fact that you’ve got such a diversity of network technologies available for IoT, it becomes overwhelming but there’s not a consistent environment in which all of the different technologies are deployed. If you went back a few years you had well, going back many years, everybody had 2G networks deployed and notwithstanding the fact that 2G meant slightly different things in North America from the rest of the world, straightforward to provide global connectivity.

Ditto, fast forward a few years. Then since then, over the last ten years, we’ve had this kind of fragmentation.

You’ve got NB-IoT, you’ve got LTE Cat 1 bis, you’ve got 5G, you’ve got 5G standalone, you’ve got non terrestrial networks and probably a bunch of other things in there that I’m not thinking of.

These aren’t all equally distributed. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing because the argument for all these technologies is that they provide a lot of functionality that is very useful for IoT deployments, longer battery life or greater functionality, but you still have an environment where you have a very fragmented set of technologies.

In which countries are 2G now available? Not every country. In which countries are NB-IoT and LTE-M available? Again, not every country. So, awareness of which network technologies are available in which territories and with what functionality becomes increasingly important.

Nick Earle: And so, we’re going to transition to how we solve this. It’s almost like the big bang. I have a picture in my mind of we talked about, oh, the good news is SGP.32 breaks amongst other things but breaks the lock that there’s been before. But then suddenly everything starts expanding rapidly and speeding up.

You laid that landscape out very well. It’s even more complex than it was before. So before we get into the topic of the whitepaper, which is eSIM orchestration, a brand new thing in a brand new role to pull all this together, an observation I would make on what you’ve said is that, last one, you talked about all the different types of radio access types, you mentioned satellite, there was things that you didn’t mention, private networks and types of connectivity, devices that can do ethernet, LoRa, etcetera. And also, you talked about the network and the latency and the need for data sovereignty, which means POPs, etcetera.

So, it seems like connectivity isn’t just connectivity. The things that people have to wrestle with is both connectivity, network capability, device capability. So, it’s almost as three, you can be an expert on connectivity and all those things, but actually you also need device expertise and network capability. Would that be?

Matt Hatton: Yeah. This is something we’ve been hammering away at for quite a while. It’s this idea that you’ve gone from an environment where it’s device on the network to device and network. What I mean by that is, as described, you rewind fifteen years, you can put a SIM card into pretty much any device, and it will work on any network anywhere in the world with comparable levels of quality. It won’t be optimised for IoT, but it will at least be consistent deployment. And that applies whether it was 2G or indeed even better with 4G because globally deployed.

But what’s happened subsequently is availability of things for optimizing IoT and because they’re about optimizing, they’re not the lowest common denominator anymore. What you’ve got is some relatively sophisticated capabilities, but it does mean that you need to be keeping an eye on cross optimisation, or want to coin that term there, but making sure that said device and the way even through to the application, the way that the application is reported is it sending tons and tons of data, can that be restricted somewhat if what you’re doing is working in a power constrained environment, all the way from the application through the device to the network connectivity is optimised to provide the best capabilities, which means that you need to have eyes on the application of the device, the network and all the various functions therein. What I’m talking about.

Nick Earle: Right. Expanding universal complexity whilst at the same time efforts by standards bodies to drive convergence. It’s almost like a paradox, isn’t it?

Matt Hatton: I would describe it as encouraging divergence. There you go, that’s maybe me.

Nick Earle: Something needs to be the thing that binds it all together. Dark matter… let’s keep the space analogy going. And you’ve said, yes, there is. It’s the emergence of a new thing.

And it’s the eSIM orchestrator will represent a class of companies. You’ve really put your neck out and say there’s going to be a new capability, and it’s called for want of a name, eSIM Orchestration, because it does enable all this complexity to be managed to some extent. The real question is what is an eSIM orchestrator and what is it that they have to be able to do?

Matt Hatton: And this comes to the nub of what we talk about in the paper. We talk at length about all the various functions, but the point is there is a set of functionality standardised by the GSM Association and theoretically anybody could do this or any enterprise could pop up and say I’m going to manage the three different elements of the functionality required, which is the SM-DP plus behind the scenes server handling the profiles and sending them out. Something called the EIM which manages this process and then the IPA which is what sits on the device and actually hosts the profile. Any enterprise could do that but think it’s the role of this function called the eSIM orchestrator, which could be provided by a connectivity management platform or a connectivity provider, because it’s more than just running those technology functions.

There’s a load more to it than that. In the report we talk about the functions that this eSIM Orchestrator platform would perform. There’s this simple stuff like managing the profile, but it gets much more complicated quickly in terms of needing to manage the profile lifecycle. How do you make sure that you’re using the profiles that are understanding the complexity we’ve just talked about, which networks are available, how do you ensure that you’re compliant in regulatory terms.

So, it’s not just a case of, well give me any profile of any operator that will probably work in that territory. There’s an obligation on some orchestrator to support picking the right profile and being aware of which networks are there and what they’re capable of. Also being aware of what the device requirements are. So, we talked about device on network rather than device and network.

One of the points of device and network is you have to understand what the device is doing and how it will interact with the network, and you will make your localisation decisions based on that as well. You probably want a single point for customer support, a single point for billing.

Nick Earle: Sometimes we talk about things that are very complex and skim over them, but the billing is a good example. Full disclosure, this is an Eseye podcast, and we have our Federation, which is like the Star Alliance. You didn’t used to be able to book a ticket on United Airlines and fly on any other airline, but now you can fly on something like forty other airlines. So, the point is you get one invoice from United and get United Airlines air miles on thirty-nine other airlines. Conceptually, that’s an orchestration of the travel experience on a global basis as a managed service through one company.

But what’s interesting is that to get one invoice to pay United and you may fly on, people probably don’t fly on more than six or seven, but if someone’s going around the world, let’s say they’re flying on six or seven airlines and we do global IoT, we do Amazon, we do Shell, we do BP, Coca Cola, and they don’t use forty IMSIs, but they might use five or six IMSIs around the world. You mentioned Brazil and the difficult countries, so to speak, technically. But the fact is that they cannot do the billing. I mean, their CMPs, connectivity management platforms, of which the dominant one is Cisco Control Centre, formerly known as Jasper, was never built for multi-IMSI and federation. And actually, there’s no roadmap as we understand it, at least.

And secondly, their billing engines are huge complex bits of code inside a telecom company. There’s no way they can do the wholesale retail reconciliation if now suddenly the invoice is going to represent, let’s take AT&T, which is one of our customers who are using our platform for their global IoT. There’s no way AT&T can access the billing engine of other operators around the world. The billing one is a really big issue because your customers are going to demand one bill.

If you’re going to provide it as a managed service, they’re to ask you to manage the profiles. They’re going to ask you to do the support, which means you have to be able to reach into those networks as a support. They’re going to ask you for a single invoice. All of these things, the operators, the platforms that they’ve got, which were formerly Ericsson, Nokia Wing, Cisco Control Center, these platforms were not built for that environment. So eSIM orchestration as a service, if you like, is definitely a new beast in the landscape because they just can’t, no matter how much money they’ve got, they couldn’t do it.

Matt Hatton: Negotiating with network operators, that’s a function. We talk about it specifically in the report and around the eSIM orchestration role. But say you’re an enterprise, conceptually you could be your own eSIM orchestrator, but are you in a position to negotiate well with all of these various network operators? We mentioned billing simplification, customer support simplification and having one point of contact for those things.

You also probably want a single point of contact negotiating the connectivity. You could bring your own connectivity if you wanted to, but in most cases, companies wouldn’t want to do that. That actually plays to one of the other points in the report which is about trusted relationships with network operators. So as an eSIM orchestrator what you want to be able to do is provide those profiles for the customer.

Operators are perhaps getting a little bit more cautious about who it is that they make those profiles available to.

Nick Earle: You’re a very diplomatic man, Matt Hatton.

Matt Hatton: It’s not a free for all, right? You have to play fair by them, and they’ll play fair by you.

Nick Earle: If I can, I think I can go a little bit further because, hey, everybody knows my bias, I’m speaking from my own experience, of course I am, but for us at least, and we are an eSIM orchestrator, eSIM orchestration is at the heart of our solution, but it also meant picking sites? In other words, is our role to compete with the MNOs or to enable them to thrive in this world? We’ve chosen to net the enablement. So, AT&T’s global SIM advanced GSA is our platform, MTN is a solution for Africa, all the eighteen countries in Africa is our platform, etcetera. But there are a lot of people who have some of the components of eSIM orchestration see it as an opportunity to compete with the MNOs and that’s historically been the case.

And because they’re connectivity resellers, the problem of course, with that is that leaves the MNO holding the baby, which is called data.

Data, as you said, right at the very beginning is coming down year on year. In fact, before this podcast, I Googled what’s the cost of a gigabyte of data done in the last five years? And the answer is between fifteen and twenty percent a year decline. You can do the maths.

And there are companies out there who are trying to drive the price down as fast as possible. That’s a big issue for the operators. They will choose who they will partner with. I think there’s a cultural, I don’t know it’s DNA, the wrong phrase, but you almost have to say, are you going to compete or enable?

And you have to choose. It certainly shows an enablement because we think the operators have so many advantages, brand, customers, capability, pipes.

The data is their product, but what they don’t have is the ability to do eSIM orchestration in the way that you’re describing. So, we think that’s the opportunity. It’s not the only way you could run an IoT company, but we think that’s the opportunity. It does involve you picking sides and being able to do federation of localised connections, which I want to come on to.

Matt Hatton: There’s another angle which is closer to is actually you’ll find there will be a number of companies that do want to perform nominally this eSIM orchestration role because it’s seen as being software based and it’s all about being an infinitely scalable platform and so they’ll gravitate towards that. But it’s not something you can magic out of the air. You have to be able to perform these other functions. So, part of the reason for flagging up these eSIM Orchestrator roles is to say it is more than just having those three technical elements of an eSIM SGP.32 proposition. There are a whole lot of commercial procedural and process capabilities that you need to have put in place as a connectivity provider over and above just the baseline functionality.

Nick Earle: I’d like it if we can, if it’s okay with you, is to bring that what we’ve talked about for the last five minutes to life with where the industry’s going.

Because you could say it’s academically interesting, you could see what they could do, is it just going to be another thing, is it really going to be fundamental going forward? But I’d like you to talk about 5G, because we know that ninety percent of all the money is going into 5G. 5G is the saviour from the operator’s point of view, because this data commoditization will drive their revenues down. If data price is going down at twenty percent a year, you’ve got to grow more than twenty percent just to stay still.

And if you grow less than twenty percent, you go backwards, so you’ve got to grow. But 5G offers the opportunity for new value-added services where you can charge more. So, it is seen not just as fast connectivity, but also an opportunity for value added services and climb the value stack. But then the issue of federated connectivity is different to federated roaming.

In other words, the ability to have eSIM orchestration of connectivity with a choice of both roaming and localization seems be increasingly relevant in a 5G world, particularly when it comes to latency.

Matt Hatton: I think this is another example of the issue of diversity in network availability.

The fact is that the way 5G is deployed and the functionality varying the slicing and quality on demand functionality that you’ll get with 5G SA networks will be different between operators. And so, if you actually want to take advantage of it, you’re more likely to localise that device. There is a lack of 5G standalone roaming.

I should point out that there’s a lack of 5G standalone networks as of yet, almost none of them have been switched on. We’re at about thirty or forty or something like that. And it’s really standalone that’s the functionality that you need. You need a 5G core. 5G non standalone is running a 4G core but a 5G access network, means you get slightly better data speeds and slightly improved latency, but you don’t get a lot of the functionality that really is the reason why you do 5G programmable network type stuff, APIs to be able to extract as much data from network, manage your devices, manage the connectivity, get access to in a more effective manner.

Nick Earle: And of course, with the roaming agreement we have customers who say to us, I do want to do it for 5G but I’m building a 5G core and I’m going to go 5G SA, but my customers want to be global. eSIM enables me to go global. All the things that you talked about, the profile management, regulatory approval, data sovereignty, switch, the ability to control the switch, the eSIM.

But if I want to deliver 5G SA, the real 5G, my words not this, 5G SA functionality, my switch needs to be able to access those capabilities and not everybody will have them and not everybody will have implemented them if they do the same way. So, then you get the promise of 5G, but again you get pushed back into the narrow box, which is why we’re hearing people say that in new areas, fixed wireless access as an alternative to fibre for branch rollouts, the ultra-reliable low latency connections. URLC lends itself to 5G, but if you can’t do QoS slicing, or if you’re tromboning the data from China to the UK for your vending machine, then it doesn’t help because the speed is too low.

You need to be able to federate the connectivity and locally connect it, which implies localisation of connection or the analogy being a United Airlines flies on a Lufthansa passenger flies on a Lufthansa plane. There’s no substitute for getting on the other airline’s plane. There’s no substitute for localizing onto the other network. And so that then is this issue of will localize federated localization or IMSI swaps or profile re-credentialing.

The idea of customer specific agreements that sit above roaming agreements where you say, I don’t want to localize everything, but for this customer, for this contract, I’m going to do smart meters for eight years.

I’d like to be able to do it for a customer specific contract. You suddenly start getting a new model that’s almost like a layer above roaming as to how to implement 5G SA in a global environment.

Matt Hatton: And that just plays more to the fact that this is pretty damn complicated. You need to either allocate a lot of resources yourself as an enterprise to managing all of this stuff or find somebody else to manage it for you.

Nick Earle: As a managed service. Exactly.

Matt Hatton: That’s the way we’ve always talked to it. It’s a non-trivial task, put it that way.

Nick Earle: Very nontrivial task. And even some of the biggest automotive companies have built large departments to do it themselves.

Sometimes fifty, sixty, one hundred people managing this, but it has to be delivered as a full managed service. I think that’s almost like the final point on it. It has to emerge for all the reasons that you said. We have to truly deliver convergence in a world that is diverging, but then there will be this role, which is neither a reseller nor a provider, but a new type of beast in the jungle, which is the same orchestrator handles all of these things truly globally with federated localization, but as a managed service, and that means a single spark, it means the single invoice, it means the interconnects, it means the support, all that nasty stuff under the water level that we don’t want to look at.

That’s the stuff that sinks the boat. It’s a big subject, especially for the operators because the operators are aware of this, but they haven’t got the tools to implement the solutions themselves. They need to collaborate going forward. It feels inevitable.

It’s not necessarily going to be quick, but as just as inevitable as it was in the airline industry or in financial settlement with SWIFT between the banks, but SWIFT does the messaging between the banks so that they can pay each other with a trust model.

It seems inevitable that this model has to come in place for IoT to take advantage of the trends you’ve been talking about.

Matt Hatton: Exactly how that manifests itself varies a bit, I think. For instance, we are actually seeing quite a lot of multilateral relationships between network operators. Take the Bridge Alliance as an example, the operators there making significant use of Dufour localising into each other’s territories and taking advantage of this technology to work more effectively together. It can take a few different forms, sometimes it’s another player sitting over the top, sometimes it’s more horizontal east west relations between the various players.

Nick Earle: Sometimes it’s just someone who doesn’t want to export but says I think the primary opportunity is to be the landing place for somebody else who’s coming into my country.

Matt Hatton: Oh definitely, particularly tier two/three single country network operators. We’re just in the process of doing a lot of work for our communication service provider peer benchmarking report looking at capabilities and strategies of different operators. Talking to some of the smaller network operators, they definitely see this as a big opportunity. They’re not going to go after big global deals necessarily, but what they can do is be an opt in recipient of the incoming connectivity coming into their territory and if you can set yourself up as a willing provider of eSIM profiles then I think it generally it does represent a good opportunity.

Nick Earle: And to finish off with the airline analogy, we always think that we’re seeing things for the first time, but I would argue IoT is one of the last industries to do this, but Star Alliance was formed in ‘seventy four, that’s fifty one years ago, but there are some small airlines like, I don’t know, Portugal Air. They’re a recipient of primarily American and other European countries, tourists who want to not just fly into the main city in Portugal but want to go regionally within Portugal. They’re very happy to be a recipient. It’s not Portuguese people going to the US.

Matt Hatton: That’s a very interesting analogy.

Nick Earle: That was a freebie for you, man.

Matt Hatton: I’ll use that.

Nick Earle: Why don’t we leave it there on the basis that I’ve finally given you an idea? I’m sure there’d be many over the years. Let’s leave it there. As you said at the beginning, we could go on for hours. For people who want to know more, we think this is really fundamental. It’s one of the most important things going on.

It is a very complex subject. We try to demystify it on this podcast. There is a whitepaper. As a reminder, it’s on eseye.com.

It’s called “eSIM Orchestration: Driving the Next Wave of IoT Connectivity”, where Matt goes into more detail on the subjects he’s talked about. But I know this is an area where a lot of people are talking and looking for guidance. It’s fundamentally important given the trends that are happening. The parallel convergence and divergence, which I’m sure there’s a physics term for that, but it’s a very interesting phase we’re at.

Matt, as always, thank you for being on the show, either the third or the fourth time. We really should count whether you’re the third or the fourth. You have third or fourth appearance on IoT Leaders, but you certainly appeared more than anybody else. If people do want to see Matt’s work, of course, he does have his own company, Transforma Insights, and you’ve written a book.

Matt Hatton: That’s going back a bit. Was 2020, I want to say that was a child of lockdown: The IoT Myth.

Nick Earle: A lot of the subjects that were in there prior to the emergence of these standards, the book was saying that unless interoperability standards emerge to enable collaboration, then IoT will be a myth, and we’ll keep on missing the forecast. But we keep on putting forecasts up and falling short. You can connect the dots on all of this.

Nick Earle: Thank you, Matt. Thank you to the listeners and viewers. Some people watch it on YouTube, and they always see you with the colorful t shirt. Now you’ve got a very nice shirt on.

Matt Hatton: I’m going upmarket a little bit.

Nick Earle: It’s a bit of a fashion show from you, Matt. I really appreciate that.

So, thanks again and thank you to our listeners. Let’s see if we can get you on for a further update in the future. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Matt Hatton Thanks, Nick.

Outro:
You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders, featuring top digitization leadership on the frontlines of IoT. We hope today’s episode has sparked new ideas and inspired your IoT and digital transformation plans. Thanks for listening. Until next time!