Europe’s IoT landscape is becoming harder to navigate. Networks are being switched off and rolled out at different speeds, new technologies are emerging, and national rules add another layer of complexity.
For Vodafone IoT’s Head of Strategy, Phil Skipper, the result is a European connectivity market that increasingly resembles a “checkerboard”.
“What we’re seeing in Europe is the landscape is becoming sort of more of a checkerboard. It’s never been holistic,” he tells Mobile Europe.
However, that fragmentation is not necessarily a problem customers want to think about. They want their connected devices to work wherever they are, without worrying about which network or technology sits underneath.
Skipper explains: “Telco regulation varies from country to country in Europe anyway. But on top of that now, you’ve got the considerations about sovereignty.
“You’ve also got considerations about the network deployment. So, 2G networks are being switched off, 4G networks are being built, 5G networks are being built on top of 4G, 5G standalone networks are being introduced, then over the top of it comes satellite.”
For IoT providers, that means managing an increasingly complicated mix of technologies while keeping the experience simple for customers.
“Now, our customers are less bothered about that. They just want global connectivity, wherever they go,” he explains.
“That’s really our job to orchestrate that complexity because we’re experts in the telecom space, whereas our customers aren’t.”
From 2G to satellite
Skipper has been with Vodafone for over a decade. When he joined the telecom giant, the IoT market was still trying to establish itself.
“The market, so over the last 15 years, it’s moved significantly,” he says. “When we started, we were- it was really about convincing people that IoT was real.”
Back then, 2G was central to many connected-device deployments. Today, businesses have a much wider range of options.
“Fast forward 15 years, you can now connect on 4G, which gives you far greater bandwidth. You can also connect on things like satellite, low Earth orbit satellite,” he notes.
“You can communicate using specialist networks, like Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), LTE for Machines (LTE-M), and Cat-M, and these are called low-power wide-area networks, which were designed specifically for IoT.”
That expansion has helped turn IoT into a major global industry. Vodafone IoT now connects more than 214 million devices across hundreds of networks and around 180 countries.
The orchestration problem
But connecting devices is only part of the challenge.
“The big operational thing that we need to deal with is this layer called orchestration over the top,” Skipper notes.
He compares it to an umbrella covering the complexity below.
“It’s putting this envelope or this umbrella- lots of people call it a single pane of glass-over the top of all this complexity, so that how we operate looks seamless to our customers. It is a challenge that goes beyond Europe. Different regulatory requirements can mean that devices need to use local infrastructure or SIMs in particular markets.
“We shouldn’t forget that it’s not just Europe. We have challenges in other markets where telco regulation is even more specific.”
However, the end goal is to make those differences largely invisible to the customer.
Tapping AI
AI is becoming part of that effort, particularly as the number of possible connectivity combinations increases.
“When you consider where IoT has gone, with all these different communications tools and all the rest of it, you need something which brings it all together. So, the customer is shielded from that complexity, he says.
“AI can decide what’s the best profile, what’s the best network, what sort of data set needs to be assigned for a device.”
Skipper does not see AI and automation as two separate trends. Instead, he sees AI as one of the technologies that will make greater automation possible.
“People think AI automation is separate. When we look at it, AI is the path to automation. Because our automation is really about the automation of processes, which can be done very well with AI.”
But AI could also change what IoT can do at the edge. Skipper describes a new category of applications as “chaotic use cases” – situations where the system cannot predict exactly what it will encounter.
“That’s something IoT has really struggled to do,” he reveals.
A more complicated European market
The underlying issue is that connectivity itself is no longer the only consideration.
Europe is moving through several generations of mobile technology at once, while countries have different approaches to regulation, sovereignty and network deployment.
“You’ve now got a very mixed set of different networks in different countries, and customers just want a consistent experience,” he says. “It’s variability that’s driving one element of this complexity.”
Alongside this, localisation is also becoming a bigger part of the picture.
“More devices will end up being localised using local infrastructure because of things like sovereignty,” he says.
The result is a far more complicated environment than the relatively simple device-to-network relationship that characterised earlier IoT deployments.
“I think all of these things add up, and what used to be a very simple, one-to-one-to-one relationship at the beginning is now much more multifaceted.
He concludes: “That’s what’s going to have to be addressed by IoT operators like ourselves, because it’s our job to make that complexity simple.”
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