IoT at Global Scale: Faster, Cheaper, and More Capable
Written by: Alexis Susset
Published: July 17, 2019
Lower cost and higher performance for IoT around the world
On July 2nd, we held our annual Soracom Discovery conference in Tokyo, Japan. This was a big day for us, with more than 4000 IoT developers and executives in attendance and a growing number of global projects on display. We’ve always worked hard to enable borderless IoT, and we believe that great IoT products have the potential for global reach. It was really exciting to see IoT demos from developers across Asia, North America and Europe. What better way for us to help grow IoT than by providing our customers with frictionless access to global connectivity?
One of the discussions we often have with customers and partners is around network availability and pricing in a specific region. With this in mind we are happy to announce that we have been able to reduce data cost for the Soracom IoT SIM by as much as 75% in 83 countries around the world. In most European markets, including France, Germany, and the UK, the cost for Soracom’s pay-as-you-go data service is now as low as $0.02 USD per megabyte. At the same time, we’ve also added faster transfer speeds and reduced latency around the world. Who says you have to choose between speed, cost, and quality?
We also now offer multicarrier support in Japan on both the DoCoMo and KDDI networks, with cost as low as $0.02/MB for use cases where KDDI alone works well. You can see a full list of countries and new pricing in today’s press release.
The IT in IoT
Why is this so important? IoT is still an area where most projects, both startup and enterprise, are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. And it’s not unusual for projects to reach cross-market deployment in a matter of months. This is a great opportunity for business, but comes with a set of challenges that resonate with the early days of cloud computing. One such challenge is sourcing providers. As an IoT project grows outside of its home market, its scale can be impacted by having to find a new connectivity provider in each new territory. Soracom Air SIMs and Soracom Air for Sigfox resolve this issue by providing a single purchase point that works around the world, with advanced cloud integration and clear pay-as-you-grow pricing in each market.
Of course, this isn’t the only challenge associated with deploying IoT devices both at scale and across borders. The second most common challenge is around management of connectivity assets. As projects grow, teams need to have clear visibility into where IoT devices are physically located and which SIM card is deployed where. Unexpected challenges are inevitable in any complex deployment, and this gives engineers the ability to both detect and resolve potential issues as they arise in the field.
This is an area we call “IT in IoT”: as in cloud computing cases, APIs and automation are essential for operational success, and the ability to self-service and troubleshoot is crucial. This is another reason we strive to make our technology accessible around the world, knowing that our customers will have the same tools and high standard of control wherever their devices are deployed.
There are many more topics that we’re working on to enable dev to scale IoT. If you’d like to learn more about our platform, connectivity and services, check out our developer documentation and our Product pages at /products/.
