Soracom, a provider of global IoT connectivity solutions with full MVNO capabilities, has announced its strategic focus on the connected car industry, addressing key challenges in connectivity and Cloud management. The company aims to offer automotive customers flexibility and control in how they deploy connected car services.
The connected car industry has faced significant hurdles due to the numerous backend processes that automakers, dealerships, connectivity providers, and consumers must navigate to bring connected vehicles to market. These challenges include managing SIM profile activation on devices, providing flexible connectivity options at a local level, ensuring end-to-end security, and integrating efficiently with connected car Cloud services to unlock various features and infotainment content.
These obstacles are reminiscent of those in the global IoT ecosystem, where Soracom’s cost-effective, Cloud-native cellular core supports multi-carrier global coverage, private fibre peering, VPNs, and cloud integration without the need for SDKs.
“The connected car journey has been like a long family road trip, with the kids continually asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ The good news is we are almost there – but for connected car services to succeed, the process of enabling them needs to be simple, secure, and scalable – for automakers, for dealerships, for connectivity providers, and most of all, for consumers,” said Kenta Yasukawa, Ph.D., CTO and Co-Founder of Soracom.
A key objective of Soracom’s connected car strategy is to support the GSMA SGP.32 eSIM remote provisioning and management standard. This new IoT eSIM standard, expected to be completed in 2025, will allow automakers, dealerships, and consumers greater flexibility in activating connected car services.
Before the SGP.32 standard, even if vehicles were equipped with eSIMs and modems, manufacturers had to work with a different connectivity provider in each country where their cars were sold, leading to lengthy negotiations and complex backend integration with carriers.
“This is hard enough to do with one carrier in one country, let alone with every carrier for every vehicle model and every model year in every country,” said Yasukawa. “All the negotiations and backend integration required can take months to set up and years to manage.”
Integrating an eSIM with the SGP.32 embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC) simplifies this, allowing automakers to securely push or pull eUICC profiles for infotainment and in-car Wi-Fi through their chosen carrier. This approach removes the need for complex backend carrier integration and offers the flexibility for dealerships or users to choose their preferred carrier from the manufacturer’s cloud, saving time and costs.
“As a vehicle manufacturer or buyer, you should drive your own car’s connectivity, not be driven by a connectivity provider,” Yasukawa said. “With flexible SGP.32 eSIM provisioning and management, you are no longer captive to negotiating pre-market integrations with carriers that are difficult to change or update.”
Soracom is ready to issue eUICC profiles compatible with SGP.22 and SGP.32 standards via API and to support SGP.32-enabled eSIMs. Its ultimate aim is to empower automotive customers with the flexibility to manage their own carrier profiles or to provide dealerships and car buyers with access through a portal. Even if eSIMs are sourced from elsewhere, Soracom can still provide global connectivity, including cellular and satellite coverage, using 3GPP NTN capability for vehicles.
Soracom is actively engaging in the automotive sector’s product cycles, having conducted proof-of-concept projects with vehicle manufacturers. The company is also a member of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC), which is helping define the computing and network architecture needed for the next generation of connected cars.
“Enabling connected cars is a team sport,” Yasukawa concluded. “Working together, we can build a simple, secure, and scalable cloud highway for connected cars.”
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