The Great IoT Connectivity Lockdown

With many of us around the world currently locked down in our homes, it’s easy to find time to look around and think of just how many devices around you are currently connected to the internet.

Maybe it’s your home computer, gaming console, laptop. Your TV, children’s tablet, smart speaker, mobile phone, watch—even your vacuum cleaner and doorbell all have the capacity to connect to the internet.

Now consider this. What if each one of those devices had to be specifically made to order for it to work in your home network? And that each one of those products was locked forever to your current home network and service provider.If you ever decided to upgrade your network, move to a new house, give a device to a friend or leave the country, all these products you paid for would no longer work.This would be ridiculous. As customers, we wouldn’t accept it and any connected future where massive numbers of IoT connections could thrive would be a pipedream. For any product that supports WiFi, this isn’t a real problem in the world today. We all know and rely on the fact that you can configure WiFi network settings and get things connected when your situation changes.But now let’s think about outside our home. More and more things around us are getting connected to the internet. Cars, streetlights, pollution sensors, traffic monitoring, security systems, online delivery lockers, health monitors, parking garages, energy meters, trackers for goods, pets or your motorbike.All these things are getting smarter and more connected and they all seek to leverage the ease of use, security and wide availability of mobile networks to make it happen.For many of these products, however, the reality of how easy it is to change networks is very different.For many of these newly connected things, they will remain locked to a specific mobile network. Forever.They have been specifically manufactured and configured to only ever work with one specific mobile network provider.To me, this model of connecting things is completely crazy.This level of commitment requires nothing short of a crystal ball to know whether these products will work first time when in the hands of customers and continue to work long into the future. If you happen to be wrong, you know the cost to change it will be immense.A key reason for this method of connecting things lies in the little old SIM card. It’s critical for securely connecting billions of devices around the world to mobile networks. All these new connected products require a SIM card to be pre-integrated into devices or included somewhere along the sales and distribution chain. And once it’s there, it stays forever.

Click HERE to view the original article.