The GSM Association’s SGP.32 standard is a major advance for cellular IoT, enabling remote provisioning and management of eSIMs, writes Jim Morrish, a founding partner of Transfoma Insights. The specification supports secure over-the-air profile downloads and updates without human intervention and is designed to support large-scale cellular IoT deployments. SGP.32 simplifies logistics, improves scalability and enables flexible communications service provider (CSP) switching, allowing organisations to move connections between carriers for cost or performance reasons, or to connect to private networks, and even temporarily to support tasks like firmware updates.
Most end-users and connectivity service providers that adopt SGP.32 will already operate legacy fleets of cellular devices that will remain in service for years. Introducing SGP.32-managed embedded SIM (eSIM) devices into such environments can increase fragmentation in the short term, creating disconnected systems, duplicated efforts, inconsistent data, higher costs and security weaknesses.
To avoid these potential downsides, organisations should seek to adopt SGP.32 eSIM technologies in a way that does not increase fragmentation. In this article we explore how single pane of glass (SPoG) platforms can potentially be a key tool for de-risking such a development.
A lesson from the past
Historically, cellular operators typically selected a single preferred connectivity management platform (CMP) to support new IoT connections efficiently, helping to reduce costs and simplify operations. This single-sourcing approach encouraged IoT-focused operator alliances that shared the same CMP, creating a degree of device and solution homogeneity across regions and strengthening customer lock-in through platform dependency.
Jim Morrish