IoT connectivity management is the software that a company uses to run thousands or millions of SIM cards inside machines, such as electricity meters, vehicle trackers and card machines. IoT stands for internet of things, which means machines that send data over a network without a person using them. A SIM inside a machine is often called an M2M SIM, short for machine to machine.
A machine's SIM sits inside a cellular IoT module, the small circuit board that connects the machine to the mobile network. A phone SIM has an owner, who notices when it stops working. A machine SIM has no one watching it. So the company that owns the machines needs software that watches every SIM for it.
Consider an electricity company in Maharashtra that installs 3,00,000 prepaid smart meters. Each meter sends its readings every 30 minutes, which uses about 5 MB of data a month. The connectivity platform does five jobs for the company.
First, it activates the SIMs in bulk. The meter maker fits the SIMs at its factory, but they stay switched off, and cost nothing, until each meter is installed in a home.
Second, it puts all 3,00,000 SIMs on one shared data plan, called a pool. The pool holds 15,00,000 MB a month, which is 5 MB for each SIM. So a meter that uses 8 MB in one month is covered by another that uses 2 MB, and no single meter is charged extra.
Third, it raises an alert when one SIM behaves unusually. Say one SIM uses 300 MB in a single day. Someone has probably taken it out of a meter and put it in a phone. The platform blocks that SIM at once.
Fourth, it lists the meters that have sent no data for a day, so that a technician can visit them.
Fifth, for meters with an eSIM, a SIM that can be reprogrammed remotely, it can move them to another operator without anyone visiting.
In India, M2M SIMs use 13-digit numbers instead of the usual 10 digits, under rules set by the Department of Telecommunications. This keeps enough numbers free for machines.
Many other machines use the same platforms, such as telematics devices in trucks and cold-chain monitors in vaccine boxes. The platform sends usage to telecom billing and real-time charging, and tells the packet core which SIMs to block or allow. Machines that send only a few bytes a day and run on one battery for years sometimes use LoRaWAN and other low-power networks instead of SIMs.