Why we need to look beyond IoT connectivity

Peter Oosthuizen, Head of Partner Service at Spitfire Network Services Limited, explains why organisations need to look beyond getting devices online and consider how connected estates will be monitored, managed and supported throughout their lifetime

Connecting a remote device is easy. Managing hundreds or thousands of them for the next five, ten or fifteen years is the harder challenge.

The conversations I have around IoT have changed noticeably over the last few years. It used to be about how to get a remote device online at all. Mobile connectivity has largely solved that – but getting connected is just the start.

Public sector organisations now deploy IoT devices across large, geographically dispersed estates. Building management controllers, environmental sensors, CCTV, energy monitoring, EV charging infrastructure and other systems all depend on connectivity to do their job.

In my experience, the question that gets far less attention is what happens after installation. Somebody still needs to monitor those connections, support the equipment, keep firmware updated and deal with faults when something goes wrong.

I believe successful IoT deployments need to consider three things from the outset: how devices will be connected reliably, how the SIM estate will be monitored, and how devices can be managed and supported remotely.

Connect: Think beyond connecting the device

Mobile connectivity has transformed the practicalities of deploying remote equipment. A SIM and router allow equipment to be installed almost anywhere with mobile coverage, without waiting for a fixed circuit or relying on whatever network exists at the site.

But I often see connectivity considered late in the design process: a great deal of effort goes into selecting the controller, sensor or application, while the connection supporting the whole solution becomes almost a commodity purchase.

There is more to consider than the cost of a SIM. Coverage and resilience matter, but so do security, core network quality, expected data consumption, how long the equipment will be in the field, and whether engineers will need remote access to it later.

That last point matters more than people expect.

If a device costs thousands of pounds to install and supports an important public service, saving a few pounds on connectivity is a false economy if an engineer later must travel to site because the connection doesn’t give them the access they need to investigate a problem.

A five-minute configuration change can easily become a half-day job once travel, site access and diagnosis are considered.

Monitor: Turning connections into a manageable SIM estate

The next challenge appears as deployments grow. Keeping track of 20 SIMs is straightforward. Keeping track of 2,000 SIMs supporting different devices and applications is something else entirely.

In conversations with customers, I see the value moving from connectivity itself towards the visibility around it.

Organisations need an easy way to see which SIMs are active and how much data they are consuming. Meaningful labels on individual SIMs also make a large estate far easier to administer than long SIM identification numbers and separate spreadsheets.

Detailed usage information, in near real-time, provides operational insight as well as cost control. If a connection that normally transfers data suddenly stops, that can be an early sign something isn’t right.

Equally, an unexpected spike in usage can flag behaviour worth investigating.

A network of connected devices needs to become a managed estate, rather than simply an ever-growing list of SIM cards.

Manage: Before sending an engineer, can we access it remotely?

This is where I think the greatest operational benefits sit. Consider a building controller at a remote site that stops responding.

Traditionally, an engineer travels to the building, gains access, connects locally and investigates – only to discover, after an hour on the road, a problem that takes five minutes to fix. Secure remote access changes that.

Where the connectivity and network architecture have been designed appropriately, an authorised engineer can access the router, gateway or controller remotely. They can check its status, investigate the configuration, apply updates or configuration changes, restart equipment or establish whether a site visit is actually needed.

We have seen this work in practice. Clement Acoustics, which provides environmental monitoring systems across the UK, needed engineers to securely access equipment deployed at customer locations. We gave their engineers that access independently of the customer’s network, without exposing any devices via public IP addresses.

Remote access doesn’t mean engineers never visit sites. Hardware fails, equipment needs replacing and some problems need somebody on the ground.

The opportunity is to eliminate unnecessary journeys and make the necessary ones more productive. An engineer who can investigate remotely before leaving, arrives with a far better understanding of the fault.

An additional sustainability benefit

There is a wider benefit too. Every avoided journey means less mileage, lower fuel consumption and fewer emissions – and engineers spending more of their day solving problems rather than driving. One journey makes little difference; across hundreds of devices and several years, the cumulative impact is meaningful – helping public bodies balance cost pressures with sustainability commitments.

Planning beyond installation

The technology to achieve this already exists. SIM management platforms provide central visibility of mobile connections and their usage. Secure private networking gives authorised engineers remote access to field equipment without exposing devices to the public internet. Spitfire brings these together through its mobile network, management platform and One Network.

But the technology is only part of the answer. The bigger change, in my view, is to consider how a connected device will be operated throughout its lifetime before it is deployed.

When specifying a new IoT solution, organisations and their technology partners should ask from the outset how connectivity will be monitored, how problems will be diagnosed, how engineers will access equipment securely and how the SIM estate will be managed – not after hundreds of devices are already installed.

The real test of a project isn’t how many devices were deployed or whether they connected on installation day. It’s the years that follow: how reliably they operate, how easily problems are identified and how efficiently the estate can be supported.

Connect the device. Monitor the estate. Manage it remotely. That is when connectivity starts delivering its full operational value.

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