In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Head of Strategy and Business Development at 1NCE GmbH, Arne Assman, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss IoT devices and low bandwidth IoT. The podcast begins with conversations around 1NCE, their service, and the use cases they focus on there. Ryan and Arne then talk about low bandwidth IoT and where Arne sees the opportunities and challenges in the market. To conclude the podcast, Arne gives a high-level overview of where he believes the IoT industry needs to improve and what to expect in the remainder of the year from 1NCE and IoT.
Arne Assmann is Head of Strategy and Business Development at 1NCE and has worked for over nine years as an Analyst and Consultant before 1NCE. He served enterprise clients in the telco, media, and IT sectors and helped with go-to-market strategies, market forecasts, and business cases. His industry focuses on M2M and IoT, digitalization, and cross-media convergence.
Interested in connecting with Arne? Reach out on Linkedin!
About 1NCE
1NCE is the first provider of connectivity and software for IoT at a global flat rate – offering fast, secure, and reliable cellular connectivity and software services in more than 100 countries worldwide. 1NCE cooperates with Deutsche Telekom AG and its roaming partners to support all common mobile communication standards such as 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, NB-IoT and LTE-M. 1NCE’s offering provides customers with the tools to efficiently scale and manage their IoT deployments while providing a transparent cost structure. 1NCE’s unique software offering on AWS enables IoT developers to quickly integrate cellular IoT connectivity into their solutions with plug & play functionalities.
Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:
(01:19) Introduction to Arne
(02:35) Background on 1NCE
(05:49) Use cases of 1NCE’s application
(09:06) Challenges With Low Bandwidth IoT
(16:25) Where can the IoT industry Improve?
(20:08) What to look out for in 2022
Transcript:
– [Voice Over] You are listening to the IoT for All Media Network.
– [Ryan] Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IoT for All Podcast. I’m your host, Ryan Chacon. And on today’s episode, we have Arne Assmann, the Head of Strategy and Business Development 1NCE. They are the first provider of connectivity and software for IoT at a global flat rate, they’re very much focusing their offerings on providing customer with the tools to efficiently scale and manage IoT deployments while providing a very transparent cost structure. So, we talk a lot about kind of just the general state when it comes to connectivity, pricing challenges with low bandwidth IoT, we’ve focus on low bandwidth IoT, good bit here, on different use cases around low bandwidth with IoT, and then other types of challenges that customers who are trying to build and scale solutions may not be thinking about and kind of advice and ways to overcome them. So, all in all great conversation, really think to get a lot of value out of this, but before we get into this episode, if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast-growing and profitable IoT market, but don’t know where to start, check out our sponsor, Leverege. Leverege’s IoT solutions development platform, provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com that’s iotchangeseverything.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT for All Podcast. Welcome Arne to the IoT for All Show. Thanks for being here this week.
– [Arne] Yeah, pleasure is all mine. Thanks, Ryan.
– [Ryan] Yeah, absolutely, it’s great to have you. So, let’s kick this off by having give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience, background, any information you think is relevant to get a better sense of who we’re listening to.
– [Arne] Sure, yeah, so my name is Arne. I’m heading the Department Strategy and Business Development here at 1NCE since the beginning of 1NCE. And before I joined 1NCE, leading the strategy, I was an analyst really looking at all the applications, everything that is going on in IoT and Times Markets. This was my area of expertise. So, it was just a coincidence that I’m with Alex, our CEO and Founder and I was writing the business case for 1NCE as an analyst and I was so thrilled by the idea, and I was going to ask Alex, “Hey, what about working for you?” And he said, sure. And there was just the story that I was then one of the first employees here at 1NCE starting the journey to really disrupt the IoT.
– [Ryan] That’s fantastic. Such a cool way to come about from your early work into a company and now actually able to kind of implement the ideas and the work you were doing ahead of time. So, talk to us a little bit about 1NCE. So, what’s the role you all play in the space overview of kind of what you offer to the industry, anything kind of along those lines?
– [Arne] Yeah. Where to start, I would like to put it in a simple phrase. So, what 1NCE is doing is we want to make the provision of IoT within the whole IoT supply chain way more easy. And it starts with that, we have created in the first place, a very compelling IoT connectivity offering. But also, since we have done this from scratch, based on software technology, not on network technology, and we can go on that a little bit deeper maybe later. But simple story, it is based on software and hence we are one of the first companies providing connectivity as it would be a software. So, we’re developing new features in combination with connectivity on a very unique way. So, you could say we are the first provider of software and connectivity service for IoT and at a very unique model, we call it flat rate.
– [Ryan] So, tell me about how that works then, because I’ve had many guests who come on and we talk about the connectivity side, we talk about the software side, how connectivity and the software pieces play together, how you can implement their connectivity which is tied in with software. So, I’m curious to hear the unique approach that you all are taking, how it differentiates between what’s in the market.
– [Arne] Yeah, again, here at the user story, is very simple or the user experience. So 1NCE provides a web shop which is a very easy start for everyone. May be an SMB, maybe developer, even an enterprise employee is able to go to our web shop and order his first test sim cards. And the way we do it is really, if you go to Amazon, it’s just the same experience. To click and already the next day, you can have it on your desk and start connecting your device with our service. And that is the simple story. There is another part of that which is also why this is so easy, is we are offering IoT connectivity at a prepaid service. So, everything that customers wanna do with us is already paid upfront. And this, at a very compelling price of $10 for 10 years. So, people are asking us in this very moment when we tell the price, “Is this enough? And is it $10 for one year?” No, it’s $10 for 10 years. So, $1 per year if you would divide it by 10. And the reason for that is very simple. We wanna target not the whole kind of IoT applications, we wanna really target the long tail of IoT. So, the low data use cases where it’s really about longevity and low data.
– [Ryan] So, when you’re talking about $10 or 10 years. So, a dollar a year, is that per device?
– [Arne] Yes.
– [Ryan] Okay, gotcha.
– [Arne] In our universe, it’s per connection but it should be the same.
– [Ryan] Makes sense. Okay, perfect. And do you all focus on any… I mean, you mentioned here kind of the low bandwidth side of things. Were there any particular use cases or applications that your technology is more aimed towards? If you think of the 10 years, you might get a very first glimpse of what typical use case this aims for.
– [Arne] Think of smart metering. Think of your heat allocator here in Europe and Germany, where we do live. Almost in every flat, there is a heat allocator on every heater and these allocators they’re spotted there, or they’re mounted on that and are supposed to be there for seven or even up to 15 years, right. Same dose for smart meters. So, they’re supposed to be in the basements or whatever they are to last for 10 years and longer. So, what we’d wanted to try with the prepaid offering that we were designing for 10 years is to really have a all singing, all dancing, one tariff that covers it all. And so, we can cover the time by that. And the second part, the second ingredient is of course the data and all the other features that you need to connect your device for up to 10 years. Believe it or not, it’s all included also within the $10. There is no upsell from our end. We wanna have it all covered because guess what, the requirements for that really, it’s not about data anymore. A lot of customers in these use cases that we address aim to consume as less data because data means energy, battery power. So, they wanna have really long living assets in the field consuming very few data, hence very few energy. And that’s the trick. And so, use cases, I mentioned smart metering. So sub metering or heat allocators is one thing. Think of smoke detectors, also very much the same. They’re in the field for years rather than months. Then you have of course, street lightings. So, everywhere in cities, you hear about smart city projects. We see it everywhere that more and more cities become connected. Streetlight is a very compelling and very interesting use case as well. Even in the US, we are currently on a project involved where we will equip a lot of street lightings in the city. And also then, infrastructure. Everything that you can think of in infrastructure. May it be pipelines, may it be, what is it, elevators, may it be bridges. Everything where you have sensors in there in the field that need to just to detect, what’s the status of my device, of my asset, of my fleet, you name it. This is there almost every time, very few data for a long time and we cover these use cases with the simple and compelling offering.
– [Ryan] Fantastic, I appreciate you kinda breaking that down. That kind of puts it into perspective for sure. If we focus here for a second on low bandwidth IoT in general, what are the biggest challenges with the implementation there? What are the biggest challenges that you of come across when you work with customers on deployment so that are you seeing in the market in general around this?
– [Arne] This is a very good question, but also very challenging to answer because the challenges that we see are very diverse. So, let me just give you some examples maybe or more anecdotes rather than giving you a very complete picture. That what we see very often is that customers are very often focusing, when they approach us in the first place, they’re focusing on the technical feasibility. So, they start rather and thinking of terms like I need to create a POC, but then going to the next stage, creating an IoT solution for a large deployment, oh, this is a completely different game because everything that you have created on the technical feasibility part in the POC becomes now very tricky. It becomes a cost problem, scalability problem, skill problem because all that stuff, so, features need to be added as well. Deploy thousands of sensors in the field is very different rather than just creating 10 or five. So, you need to think of workarounds, how to really manage thousands of devices, how to activate thousands of devices and so on. And then of course, in addition, the cost for that. So, in a nutshell, all these kind of developments and stages where customers go through, it is very important for all of us to understand, for us IoT experts, I mean, to understand where customers are at this very moment so that we can help them on their specific needs. And like I said, a customer who wants to create a POC, he can have all the features he wants to have as many features as possible whereas of course, the deployment, the large scale employment customer, he of course, is asking for bulk operations. He needs to go for energy consumption protocols allowing him to reduce the battery power features like zero touch device provisioning. So, I have one customer, a fleet telematics provider, the CTO was telling me I really have a problem once I want to activate a device in the cloud. It means you have to put in a token, you have to create a security, a protocol that says, “Okay, there is a device knocking on my cloud door asking for permission but I don’t know who it is because it has no identification number.” In these kind of things, zero touch provisioning is one of the challenges that tries to cope with that whereas the device already has this identification because for instance, it uses our ID that we provide through the connectivity and it is linked to, for instance, AWS. So, it knows already the AWS Cloud already knows in the beginning that the device knocks, it’s a 1NCE connection so it gives it through. If you wouldn’t have this kind of feature in the first place, you would have to create a workaround and the CTO was telling me exactly that. So he said, I need to come up with these kind of procedures, tokenization, all that stuff every time, and this is weeks of work, right. And this is just one example. Sorry to be a little bit more in this kind of stories.
– [Ryan] No, I think it’s fascinating. I think as we talk about different areas of IoT, anytime we can kind of elaborate on the challenges and then kind of how things are being done, it’s super important, which all ties back into kind of the approach you all are taking of bringing the cost of the connectivity down.
– [Arne] Exactly. That’s one of the most challenging questions for customers. And really, I have this other customer who’s saying to me he’s doing an asset tracking solution for caravans, for assets, for bicycles and so on. And he was telling me, “Arne, really, I cannot hear it anymore. All of people out there thinking IoT is about data. It is not, it is about energy.” For instance, in his universe for sure. I know there are different use cases. It is data related and I don’t wanna blame that right now but it’s just the kind of current digging that you need to have in mind once you start to create your solution in the sphere where you are at.
– [Ryan] And also, a lot of the use cases you’ve talked about, they weren’t having trouble getting the data before. Data was available to them where a lot of other IoT use cases, data was not available. They weren’t able to pull data off some physical object until they had a sensor built to pull data off of it. So, there’s very different approaches. So in the world, you’re kind of talking more about and focusing on instead of optimizing to find data, it’s optimizing to have the thing run. What kinda energy consumption does it have? How can the battery last longer without having to, in order to optimize operations and overall cost as opposed to building something to pull data off something that you couldn’t data from before?
– [Arne] Yeah, Ryan, you’re bringing up a very, very good point. I wasn’t aware of that but I think you have a point here. Like you said, data was never a problem. So, to get the data from A to B, this whole kind of process is not the problem. What is the problem is to get this up and running and also how to transport data, but not really to transmit the data and how much. This is not the problem because right there you have your rates and currently, really, if you look into the market, all the buyers out there, please take it out because we wanna do it differently. They focus on, okay, how much data do you wanna transmit? This comes at cost XYZ. We wanna play it the opposite way. We wanna say, “Okay, we know data is something. We make it very compelling for you. Don’t bother the data amount but let’s focus now on the other approach like what protocol do you wanna use? How do you wanna set up your module? What kind of module are you using? Is it IoT, LTE and blah, blah, blah?” And so on, so many questions and we wanna educate them and go the journey together with our customers. So, we are creating a developer library for them. We are creating services, software services on top of them, but we know we’re just in the beginning, right. So, starting at this journey creating cool services, but really wanna learn from our customers how they evolve, how they really get into this stage of, “Oh, now I’m at the stage where I have a very large deployment. Hey, now I need this service.” And hence, we are very much in contact with our customers and this is what I really like.
– [Ryan] Absolutely. That’s fantastic. So, before we wrap up here, I wanted to ask you if we kind of pull this away from just focusing on low bandwidth IoT for a second, what else are you seeing in the market? What other challenges our company is facing, what other, I guess, areas of innovation are we kind of lacking? Just other things that you’re seeing happening in the space that are kind of worth thinking about and we could be doing better around.
– [Arne] So, I was asked yesterday by an analyst, what I do think about these big players like AWS and Microsoft. And also, cost customers are asking me very often. And for instance, there is a term which is called vendor lock-in. And I was saying, “Okay, vendor lock-in, maybe you should take care about that.” And then I thinking it through over this night, really, and thinking now, actually the other way around. Don’t fear a vendor lock-in. And let me explain why. The moment where you start creating a solution, you need to basically bring together two kind of ecosystems. The one is the ecosystems around hardware. So, there are a few then you have your module, descenders, all that stuff. This is a complete world of its own. Having own protocols, having own standards and so on. And then the other side, which is the cloud, which is the software world where you have the AWS’s and the things works, PTCs and so on, again, another different bubble. And you know how these kind of if you are on a trade show and there is this discussion about how to bring those worlds together. And the more I think of it is what we are trying to do as one player in the middle as the connectivity players to bring those to bridge the gap in the one place, but also saying to customers, “Please focus on one part.” So, once you go to maybe one of the bigger players who have already a very good ecosystem, it makes your life easier on the hardware side and it would be good to say, “Okay, it could be vice versa.” So once you go to a hardware manufacturer, you would have automatically a very good way into the cloud. I think it’s still some time to go but there are already some smaller players like Blues Wireless, for instance very, very cool and smart companies who try to cope with that. They start with the hardware but have a very compelling ecosystem in their back. I love those kind of things. Even if we might be sometimes competitors and sometimes not, because we are compatible, however, I like this because this goes into the right direction and I’m speaking as a kind of IoT believer. I want to have this market driven.
– [Ryan] Yeah, we’ve kind of taken a similar approach just viewing, I know, obviously from a individual company standpoint, there’s this level of competition that everybody kind of has but us the fact that there are options now and there’s more things going on in the space with companies, innovating companies are building new connectivity types that are more optimized for use cases, you name it. It’s just making IoT more likely to be adapted and more easily understood, and more deployments just increase the likelihood that IoT grows the way we’ve been all anticipating it to grow. So, I totally get where you’re coming from and kind of how you’re viewing this as opposed to viewing it potentially from an individual company space and kind of trying to take it as more of a negative. But this conversation’s been fantastic, Arne. Thanks so much for taking the time. So, now that we’re in 2022, tell me a little bit about what we should be on the lookout for coming outta 1NCE and how our audience can kind of stay in touch and learn more, follow up with any questions, that kind of thing.
– [Arne] Yeah, so what to look at is really looking at features where all these hardware related stuff becomes more automatized or softwarized. I think this will be the future. And I think there is already some buzz around these first services like EOYCC, so where the sim card might be just… I mean, you have it already in your chip when you use your watch or so. This of course could be adaptable for IoT as well but it is some time to go but I think anyhow, this will be the trend towards too so that the hardware elements will be somewhat already mounted or integrated within the kind of bigger processes and so on. This is one part I’m really embracing and where we are really happy to see how 1NCE can play a part in that. And of course, then the second part is this ecosystem game of AWS, Microsoft and so on because we’re looking at it very carefully but also embracing the opportunities it brings for customers because it makes a lot of things easier because they have now a tool set at one player at hand and can start right away and make it more seamless and you can avoid a lot of these obstacles and problems that a lot of other customers had already three or five years ago. So, because it’s all now automatized and more standardized, and I think this is the second step that we will see in IoT and I’m looking forward to play a part in that as well.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. And people kind of follow up or stay in touch through the website, through social media, all those kind of channels.
– [Arne] Yeah, so since we are really a digital product, you can follow us on the internet, on the website, on a LinkedIn, on Twitter, everywhere, for sure. 1nce.com the most easiest way.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. Well, Arne, thanks again so much for taking the time. This has been a fantastic conversation and I look forward to hopefully putting more content together in the future and sharing with our audience, kind of everything that’s going on over at 1NCE, I think you have a lot of great stuff happening.
– [Arne] Thanks, Ryan, it was a pleasure.
– [Ryan] Thank you. Hi everyone, thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT for All Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as it become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you next time.
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