The multiple phases involved in building and deploying IoT devices and networks, from continuous monitoring and maintenance to handling data volumes and expanding geographical reach can face challenges at any point – which was the subject of a recent webinar held by KORE, which IoT Insider attended.
Sharing insights on building, managing and scaling IoT, the webinar brought together panellists to discuss this; Kayleigh Thomas, Director of Marketing at KORE; Lee Garrett, Head of PreSales, Westbase.io; Adrian Ward, Senior System Engineer for Cradlepoint, part of Ericsson; Mayank Sharma, Regional VP, Solutions at Kigen all took part.
Following on from the findings from a recent survey KORE conducted, Kayleigh Thomas explained that there are two challenges for enterprises wanting to use cellular technology for the first time: “54% of all respondents cited the difficulty in unpicking 3GPP standards for software and hardware. I think you could expand this more into general regulation and compliance. While 56% reported a lack of a simplified model for rolling out devices, which was a major barrier.”
Thomas went on to highlight “interesting differences” between adopters versus non-adopters of technology, notably that 63% of cellular IoT adopters said that 3GPP standards represented the most significant challenge versus 42% of non adopters. “It could be that those who have not yet adopted the technology might underestimate the complexity in developing software and firmware solutions for devices,” she suggested.
Presentations
In walking attendees through the building and deploying journey, Mayank Sharma from Kigen was first to share a presentation on “Building efficient systems and scaling with SGP.32,” the new eSIM standard. Sharma outlined a short history of eSIMs, as well as the advantages they brought to the IoT industry and the use cases it unlocked.
“One of the key advancements made with eSIM was this ability to remotely manage these SIMs, for example you could change the operator that is built on the SIM card. This may sound like a no brainer and a simplistic upgrade, but actually it has a massive effect on the entire IoT industry,” summarised Sharma.
He said that at Kigen there was an acknowledgement “that eSIM technology itself is great, but we have to simplify the adoption of it. So we focus heavily on helping OEMs within their factories where previously they would have received SIM cards from different operators.”
Second to speak was Adrian Ward from Cradlepoint, who discussed “Internet of Talk – Edge compute”. His presentation looked at the increasing amount of volume generated by an increasing number of sensors collecting it, and a shift observed in the industry towards using cellular technologies.
“A lot of organisations have centralised processing for their data, but now you can do all your analytics on the Edge,” explained Ward.
Finally, Lee Garrett from Westbase.io spoke on “Deploying IoT solutions: Best practices for success”, who shared best practices for deployment that centered on working with a unified solution; ensuring your deployment is future ready; and scaling your deployments with other technologies.
Under these three points, Garrett explained that looking for the right supplier who can provide an all-in-one or unified solution is “one of the most critical decisions you’ll make when deploying a new IoT solution”. As part of the second point, three key features are looked at when ensuring the deployment is future-ready – that it’s scalable, can utilise Edge computing, and is secure. For scaling your deployments with other technologies, Garrett focused on extended reality (XR) and AI: “It is critical that organisations find ways like XR and AI to enhance their eyes and find those technological synergies,” he said.
Challenges to IoT deployments
A poll ran at the end of the webinar showed that in response to the number one issue to their deployment, 38% of attendees cited a lack of internal resource and skill set, 19% said a lack of IoT vision and strategy, 16% said global connectivity, and a joint 14% reported IoT devices’ security concerns and an inability to scale and manage.
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