Enterprises seeking to deploy cellular IoT or M2M solutions want a single
service that functions worldwide. This is true whether they want to buy service
for a large number of subscriptions that will each be homed in a number of
countries, or whether they have subscriptions that need to travel frequently
across national boundaries.
Presently, this is very difficult to achieve. Spectrum is viewed as
national property, and it is regulated and licensed for use at a national
level. Consequently, service providers (carriers) are licensed and operate only
within national boundaries. Even for those cases when one carrier can actually
buy another carrier in a different country, the owning carrier is required by
law or regulation to keep the operations separate and operating at arm’s
length. So international consolidation among cellular service providers has not
been possible like it has been with almost every other multinational product or
service. Cellular service can only be purchased country by country.
Each of these national cellular carrier wants to make sure that they
get the revenue when they are providing service to the subscription, and they
get to count the subscription in their publicly reported subscriber numbers.
The historic way that national carriers enforce that they are getting their
“fair” share is to require a separate, direct contract for service with them.
And international roaming rates are set at onerous levels to discourage
bypassing this arrangement. Shutting off permanently roaming subscriptions has
been another mechanism to force local contracting in the M2M business.
So, traditionally, an enterprise needs to enter into a commercial
relationship with each national carrier in whose country it wants cost
effective cellular service for M2M applications. That also means that the
enterprise has to use each carrier’s unique device management portal to manage
the subscriptions that operate in that country. Enterprises that want to
acquire worldwide cellular service under one contractual relationship, managed
with one portal, with one low price, are stymied.
Enter the World SIM. The World SIM is an attempt to provide enterprises
with a single subscription that can operate anywhere in the world and that can
be managed through one portal.
In practice, service under a World SIM is provided one of two ways.
Under the first approach, the home or primary carrier enters into roaming
relationships with a broad number of other national cellular carriers (although
usually only one per country) so that the World SIM can operate in each
country, even roaming permanently, while still being managed through the
primary carrier’s portal. The drawback of this World SIM approach is that the
unit is still roaming when outside of the primary carrier’s country, at the higher
prices that roaming entails. A characteristic of this approach is that the
price for service is tiered into “zones” (i.e., groups of countries), with the
prices in secondary and tertiary countries usually being relatively steep.
The other approach to providing a World SIM is to use technology to
turn the SIM into a local subscription in whatever country in which it
operates. One method is to get a subscription identifier (i.e., IMSI) from each
target country, and to embed that identifier into a more intelligent, capable
SIM. The SIM will recognize the country code of the network in which it is
attempting to operate, and will register with the local IMSI that will provide
service at the lowest price. Another method is to program the appropriate local
IMSI into the SIM over-the-air so that the device is receiving service at local
carrier rates. The drawback of these approaches is that the enterprise still
needs to enter into a separate contract with each individual national carrier, and
to negotiate appropriate pricing (so, for instance, that a single device is not
bearing a monthly recurring charge for each IMSI that could possibly be
programmed into it, whether it operates in that country or not). As with the
first World SIM approach, the enterprise can manage all of its M2M subscriptions
worldwide through a single device management portal, but the effort to set up
these programs in more than a handful of countries is onerous.
None of these approaches to providing a World SIM truly accomplish the
overall goal, which is to allow a subscription to have access to cellular
service anywhere in the world under one commercial agreement, with one low
price (MRC and usage charges).
Providing worldwide M2M service is a commercial problem, not a
technical problem. What some visionary carrier really needs to do, is develop a
“product” that solves the overriding commercial problem with a purely
commercial solution. That solution should enable an enterprise to enter into a single
world-wide agreement with a “consortium” of cellular service providers. The
enterprise's subscriptions should roam and receive service from any consortium
carrier’s serving network just like today. No changes to the SIMs. No changes
to any carrier’s OSS. No changes to the carrier interconnects. But in the
background each carrier’s BSS should treat these subscriptions differently. The
consortium lead carrier, or a third party, would sets up a clearinghouse
operation for collecting billing and “roaming” records from all consortium
carriers for these worldwide enterprise subscriptions. The clearinghouse would
provide one invoice to the enterprise for all subscriptions (either directly or
through a “primary” consortium carrier), charged at the one “local rate” price
regardless of where the subscription actually received service. The
clearinghouse would also then provide the proportionate share of the enterprise
payments to each carrier that provided service to the enterprise worldwide
subscription, along with the “right” to claim that subscription in its base numbers
for the billing period.
A consortium with clearinghouse is one way of accomplishing this.
Having one lead carrier act as a master distributor for all other participating
carriers would be another, and there are probably other possible structures.
But the overall objective is to provide a single, simple, transparent,
worldwide cellular M2M service to enterprises, with the carriers working out
the commercial reconciliation among themselves in the background.
A World SIM with high costs in some countries is not the answer
enterprises need. Nor is making the enterprise strike contracts with each
separate national carrier. Just solve the commercial problem directly. The
cellular carriers already have standards and interconnected systems that can
provide cellular service worldwide to any subscription. The only issue that
hasn’t been solved to make it simple for the enterprise is how to divide up the
carrier revenues.
