5G, Industry 5.0, eSIM connection: the key to the future development of the Internet of Things

On February 9, 2022, Eseye, a provider of IoT connectivity solutions, released its second annual Future of IoT report, which collected key insights from 11 leading Internet of Things (IoT) decision makers. The individuals ranged from IoT business founders and evangelists to industry analysts and CTOs, as well as presidents of communications and IoT security organizations.

The 56-page report highlights why increasing device connectivity is key to unlocking value and innovation in global IoT deployments. In addition, it highlights the focus on securing IoT and enabling real-time visibility of an enterprise’s entire fleet of assets. The report also explores the role of IoT in cross-industry adoption and how eSIM will accelerate global IoT deployments in 2022 and beyond.

Other key findings include:

• How to deploy the best combination of IoT and people to deliver transformational projects
• Why the importance of strong device connectivity should not be underestimated
• Unleashing the potential of cellular IoT in 5G and beyond
• Improving IoT education from all sides, from developers to end users and suppliers

“Our Future of IoT report reveals unique insights from prominent industry players across the IoT ecosystem. This is just us, a collective working together. The report highlights the need for collaboration between enterprises and their IoT partners to achieve their 2022 ambitions,” commented Nick Earle, CEO of Eseye.

Unleashing the potential of 5G for IoT

Peter Doggart, Chief Strategy Officer at Armis, focused on the importance of designing security into IoT systems from the outset. Doggart spoke about the importance of a proactive approach to ensure that every device in an enterprise IoT deployment is secure and reliable. Because IoT devices can number in the hundreds of thousands and are often located in remote areas, a security-first design approach is necessary.

“It’s critical that we educate device developers about the need to build security from the ground up, consider the ability to patch, and think from a DevOps perspective all the way up to production operations. By helping them understand this, we stand a good chance of preventing the floodgates from opening for potential security hacks,” Doggart claimed.

“Without reliable connectivity, businesses are operating in blind spots, whether they are using private or public networks,” commented Eric Conn, CEO and founder of Leverege, an IoT digital transformation organization. Mikael Persson, CTO of Sigma Connectivity, added: “The much-anticipated Release 17 of the 3GPP mobile broadband standard will outline additional 5G system enhancements that will ease current deployment challenges and help ‘truly unlock the potential of IoT in 5G’.”

How IoT is developing Industry 5.0

Leonard Lee, managing director and founding member of research and advisory consultancy neXt Curve, noted that IoT has had the biggest impact in two sectors that continue to make headlines: oil and gas and healthcare. The latter’s impact on helping deliver vital healthcare services remotely during the pandemic has ensured that local authorities are able to triage patients more effectively at a time when hospital capacity and resources are stretched to breaking point.

Vernon Turner, principal and chief strategist at IT market research firm Causeway-Connections LLC, said human expertise is essential to fully harnessing the power of IoT in any industry. According to Turner, “By using IoT to gain deep insights into complex human behavior and then feeding that back into human decision making, we can truly deliver new ways of working and new value.”

Industrial manufacturing is a great example of how IoT sensor data can be fed into machine learning models, which can then be turned into digital tools to educate workers about certain solutions.

“The next phase of IoT needs to shift from ‘what can technology do?’ to ‘how do we bring technology and people together to enable true transformation?’ The transformation promised by sensors and robots introduced by Industry 4.0 has not yet been achieved. The real transformation will come when we recognize that these technologies must adapt to and augment human systems. I call this ‘Industry 5.0’,” Turner added.

How eSIM puts businesses in control

For IoT to achieve its required level of market disruption and enterprise value delivery, it must move to a device-localized approach. Switching from proprietary SIM cards to eSIM cards provides enterprises with additional degrees of freedom and control over parameters such as signal strength, device security, and policies.

Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of TELUS, highlighted how eSIM can revolutionize the IoT connectivity value chain as it can be “embedded into any device and makes it simple to manage connectivity, no matter where it is in the world.”

Steffen Sorrell, research director at Kaleido Intelligence, outlines how this approach will solve the ongoing problem of permanent roaming for IoT devices, “eSIM decouples the SIM from the operator so that network providers can be switched remotely over the air. This flexible framework enables companies to adapt to the local market where the device is deployed and avoid a roaming model known as localization. This helps IoT devices stay connected anywhere in the world, especially in those regions where permanent roaming is restricted in some way.”

“Adopting an eSIM approach to connectivity will be critical to helping realize the opportunities predicted by the experts we gathered above, helping to unlock huge opportunities for many in the IoT ecosystem,” Earle concluded. “2022 will undoubtedly be a watershed year for IoT and the year that enterprises finally take control.”