How AT&T is Mastering Global IoT
IoT Leaders with Mike Van Horn, Area Vice President, Product Development & Management, Internet of Things, AT&T
Global IoT connectivity stands at a transformative crossroads. The traditional model of operator-specific SIMs and roaming agreements no longer meets the demands of modern IoT deployments. A new paradigm is emerging, driven by the need for true global connectivity and localization.
Mike Van Horn, AT&T’s Area Vice President, Product Development & Management, Internet of Things, joins the podcast to discuss how eSIM orchestration and federated localization are reshaping IoT connectivity. Mike explores the evolution from traditional roaming to automated eSIM management, the importance of device expertise, and why localization matters more than ever. The conversation delves into key topics, including:
- How eSIM orchestration enables global deployments
- What AT&T and Eseye’s announcement at MWC25 means
- The purpose and benefits of AT&T’s Global SIM Advanced solution
- Why device optimization remains critical
This episode examines the future of IoT connectivity and how eSIM orchestration and embedded advanced automation rules will drive the next wave of IoT connectivity innovation. Tune in to understand the technology transforming global IoT deployments.
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Transcript
Intro:
You are listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, lessons learned, success stories, and innovation strategies that work.
Nick Earle:
Hi, this is Nick Earle, the CEO of Eseye. And this is the one. This is the podcast. You’ll hear me say this a couple of times in the podcast that’s coming up now. This is the one I’ve been waiting for, let’s just say almost two years. Because it was almost two years ago that AT&T and Eseye started talking together about an idea. An idea that actually, maybe what we could do is enable AT&T to have a new value-based offering, which would enable global connectivity for their customers with a lot of benefits.
And maybe that platform could be Eseye’s. Almost two years later, here we are at Mobile World Congress announcing the fact that AT&T is white labelling Eseye’s platform to create their new global IoT solution called Global SIM Advanced. It has been an amazing journey with lots of meetings and lots of contract negotiations.
Finally, with the big public announcement, you’re going to hear Mike Van Horn, who is the AVP of IoT Product Management for AT&T over in Atlanta, talking about the whole background to this, why AT&T is doing it, what’s being announced, the benefits to the customers, and a little glimpse into the future of where this can go.
So, with all of that as a setup, I’m going to hand over now to my podcast with Mike Van Horn, who runs the product side of IoT for AT&T, and I think you’re really going to enjoy this. I think it’s a significant announcement for IoT in the industry. Here we go.
Mike, welcome to the IoT Leaders Podcast.
Mike Van Horn:
Thanks, Nick. Really excited to be here. Appreciate you inviting us.
Nick Earle:
Yeah, we’re really glad you’ve been here. We’ve done over 50 of these podcasts. I just found out recently that we have listeners in 93 countries, which is amazing. This is the podcast that I’ve wanted for a long time.
You and I have been talking to each other. The organizations have been talking to each other for quite a while, well over a year. The goal was always the launch of something big between us. This podcast is part of that launch.
So really great to see you and been looking forward to this for a long time. So, let’s dive in. Mike let’s start off with, who you are and your role.
Mike Van Horn:
Awesome. Yeah. I’ve been with AT&T for a little over 24 years. I started right out of college with AT&T, and I’ve led teams in consumer business across sales, marketing, and operations. But the last six I spent in IoT. And this is by far my favourite assignment to date. So today I lead the product organization AT&T for our IoT connectivity and solutions. You can think about everything from connectivity to platforms, professional services and full end-to-end solutions, all with connectivity at the heart. My team is one of the best in the business and I’m honoured to lead them.
Nick Earle:
Nice to have a proud leader on the call. I’ve met many members of your team, and they are absolutely great and we’re going to get into that.
Before we do, let’s take a step back. Everyone’s heard of AT&T. IoT is a piece of AT&T’s business. Is there any sort of high-level sizing or description or explanation of AT&T’s IoT business to put into context what we’re about to talk about?
Mike Van Horn:
Sure, I’d be happy to. For some of your global listeners and watchers, we invented the telephone. Alexander Graham Belzer, we’ve been doing this a long time. From an IoT perspective, we’re one of the largest IoT connectivity providers in the world. We have more than 140 million connections on our network.
Everything from 60 of the top US automotive brands to innovative healthcare startups. We connect it all the advantages are the strength and security of our network. That’s what AT&T is known for but probably more important is the knowledge and experience of our team members.
So not just my team, but the broader, we’re called AT&T Connected Solutions inside of AT&T. This group has been doing IoT for a really long time, much longer than I’ve been here. And they’re some of the smartest people that I’ve been around. IoT connectivity can be very complex and challenging, and these folks make it look easy oftentimes.
Yeah, this is a great spot to be.
Nick Earle:
Yeah. And just in case there’s anybody who doesn’t know, and they’re thinking what are they referring to? Because, as I said, this is the podcast is a series of things that are released, including press releases, analyst briefings and whatever.
But is a new offering from AT&T, which we’re going to unpack called Global SIM Advanced, which is essentially Eseye’s platform white labelled by AT&T.
You talk about the complexity. That’s actually the reason we started the IoT Leaders Podcast series four years ago to demystify IoT.
But also there’s been a lot of change historically, I’ve talked a lot on the podcast about over 800 operators essentially with the same business model is to take their own SIM to market via platforms such as Cisco Jasper or Ericsson, now Aeris, and several others.
But it’s essentially their own SIM with Direct Connect and their roaming agreements. But the new capabilities, the new standards in the GSMA are enabling interoperability. And multi-operator solutions such as eSIM, eUICC, eSIM orchestration, SGP.32, and that’s enabling true global connectivity.
So, from your point of view, could you comment a little bit on these trends and what implications they have for your business and in particular for your customers?
Mike Van Horn:
Yeah, absolutely. I started my career in consumer and did a little bit of cellular in enterprise.
There are complexities when you think about connecting smartphones and tablets and those sorts of devices. But in the IoT space, I haven’t encountered anything more complex when you think about connectivity and the solutions from the type of module, the device. The firmware and software that are running the networks, whether it be domestic or global regulatory environments.
The list goes on and on. More than ever, customers of all sizes, biggest of the big and smallest of the small are looking for elegant, simple connectivity that just works. And it needs to work anywhere in the world. This is a lot easier said than done, as you well know. In many cases, as you mentioned, customers look to a multi-carrier strategy.
In least complex scenarios, they ship devices with three, four or five SIM cards in them and try until they get a hit. In more complex scenarios, as you mentioned, you have eSIM, eUICC. The problem there is that oftentimes you have to have a really big department of folks to manage those sorts of things, and you have to have access to tools and technology that only large telcos have.
There are very few customers in the world that can effectively do it themselves. Some of our largest automotive customers can pull it off but a lot of others can’t. Even some that do, don’t want to. They want simplicity and the evolution of the eSIM standards and development of automated eSIM orchestration platforms is making it possible for companies of all sizes to have that kind of ubiquitous, resilient connectivity.
And so that’s the trend and AT&T intends to be at the forefront of that trend delivering for customers. Along with great technology collaborators like Eseye.
Nick Earle:
One of the comments just before we do the formal reveal of what we’re announcing, despite me already doing a little scoop earlier on, one of the things that we’ve talked about on this.
Is this issue of global versus regional? By far the vast majority of IoT right now isn’t truly global, single product SKU. People have said, if we’ve been doing this for so long, you mentioned we’d be doing it for a while. We’ve been doing it even before it was called IoT and it was called M2M, why suddenly is everyone talking about global?
And one of the ways that we have answered that, which is, and I like to answer it is to say, if you were a company of any size and you’re manufacturing you’ve got supply chain, you’ve got distribution, you’ve got installation and ongoing operations, the cost of having to maintain different and SKUs for connectivity to, build open devices with SIM slots to actually put different SIMs in around the world because you couldn’t do truly global from a single SIM, to maintain all the admin to manage all the operator contracts, all the different pricing, different portals and no single source of truth.
If someone said to you, what if you didn’t have to do that? Show me one customer who wouldn’t think that was a good idea. The fact that it hasn’t been done to a large extent so far is not because people didn’t want it because the economics are so compelling. It’s that it wasn’t possible previously.
They don’t want to maintain 10, 12 different operators, contracts and have a team of 30 people, which we see all around the place. It’s got 30 people banded: they’re acting enterprises acting as an MVNO. They don’t want to do it, but they’ve had to do it because you couldn’t get it all from one place.
So, with that as a setup, what are AT&T and Eseye announcing at Mobile World Congress this year?
Mike Van Horn:
Drum roll… We’re announcing Global SIM Advanced. In addition to our already robust IoT connectivity portfolio, our AT&T Global SIM, and our standard IoT offering has roaming agreements all over the world.
And so, this is more than that. This goes well beyond, what we’re talking about here is a multi-IMSI eSIM with automated orchestration and single pane of glass connectivity management. And you’re buying this from AT&T. And so, you have the security, the know-how, and the resources of AT&T along with the technology and network relationships of Eseye.
It’s really the best of both worlds. It gives customers access to simple, resilient, redundant connectivity, the best coverage possible, it gives them localization for performance or regulatory compliance reasons, gives them insurance if they’re concerned about network longevity, whether it be an AT&T or a roaming partner, and so really and truly it is the best possible connectivity solution for an IoT deployment, and particularly if customers want one SKU they can send anywhere in the world and it’ll work. You talk about operational efficiencies that’s how you get there.
Nick Earle:
That’s a lot of money. All that admin and complexity we’ve been talking about. Maybe just before we go to the next part of this is just double click on one component of it. You talked about localization, and we’ve used the phrase federated localization. I know that you have some pretty strong views with regard to why localization might be needed. And so, part of that is the use case. Part is regulatory around the world. And part is the future in terms of 5G and what’s going to happen at the edge. Maybe you could comment a little on the current and future need for localization.
Mike Van Horn:
Yeah, absolutely. Roaming is a very powerful, elegant and simple way to expand your footprint. But there are a lot of reasons why roaming won’t solve the needs of many today and even more tomorrow in IoT. The first one is, anybody doing global IoT deployments understands that there are some countries in the world that have very strict regulatory conditions that prohibit permanent roaming. That require localization, and a local IMSI on a device after a certain period of time. It’s hard to do for even the largest customers and largest MNOs. And so, when you have a platform, like the platform we have with Eseye, and you have a federation of network operators around the world, like the AnyNet Federation, and you add the power of AT&T, and our footprint and our security. I think you really start to get at what customers are looking for. They may have looked to buy from an MVNO and tried to piece together a solution that looks like that, but now they can buy from one of the global leaders in IoT.
Mike Van Horn:
We know that advanced network services like quality of service on demand, network event monitoring, these things won’t work when you’re roaming. The only way to create a seamless experience, whether on your home network or you’re localized in another country, is to have this local IMSI and to have this platform that allows you to see and manage your connection, regardless of whose IMSI it’s using.
That’s the power of what eSIM gives. You won’t be able to do quality of service on demand with roaming, but you will with eSIM and localization.
Nick Earle:
I think that’s going to be a very big subject, going forward. Now, I know you went through a formal process. I know it was very formal. We’ve never met so many legal departments in all our life as we met, negotiating the contract.
We enjoyed every minute of it, absolutely. You actually did go through a formal process. There was a scoring system, lots of people involved. You don’t make these decisions lightly. This is a pretty big deal. I remember in my Cisco days, way back when you selected Jasper. Again, that was a big deal.
But it was a formal process. Can you at a high level say in your own words why AT&T selected Eseye for this solution?
Mike Van Horn:
Because I love you guys, you’re the best.
You and your team rock. Like you said, a long and rigorous process behind this selection. And, we had a long rubric of criteria. The reality is Eseye, came out ahead by a fairly large margin in aggregate. And so, some of the key things are: you’ve already got large customers and are performing well with those large customers on your platform.
That helps when you think about a company the size and scale of ours with the customers we have, we can’t do any science projects with our customers. It needs to be proven. The next thing is you have a number of operators in your AnyNet Federation. That, I think could be really complimentary to what AT&T brings to the table.
I was introduced to Jodi at TELUS. And we talked about Eseye and we, I continue to think that she was instrumental in helping me get connected with you all.
It really comes down to the product, the eSIM orchestration platform you have, the capabilities that you have. The experience that customers have when using the connectivity management platform. All of that really stood out when we were doing our evaluation.
I think the thing that really pushed you ahead is the device experience that you and your team have. A lot of people seem to have the impression that if you get a SIM with a couple of IMSIs on it and you pop it in a device, it’s just going to work, and it’ll work everywhere. And some of these really low-cost MNO or MVNOs, try to solve the global IoT problem that way.
But it doesn’t work. And the reason is because there’s a really, complex dance that happens between the SIMs, the network and the device. And, you have to know what steps the device is taking. You have to know how to manage those steps or in your case, overwrite those steps to make sure the device stays connected.
The device experience and your SMARTconnect capabilities really help push you to the front.
Nick Earle:
Yeah, thank you for that. I can promise listeners we did not write that for you. Speaking from the heart, but I think you also shining a light on a belief that we’ve had. And to give credit that our founders, we’re a 16-year-old company and our founders have had for 16 years, one is it can only be done by a federation approach like the Star Alliance and the airline industry.
It has to be a switch that the power of the secret sauce is. It’s first of all in the switch and the ability to set the switching rules to be, agnostic and abstracted from the underlying operators, but agnostic and controlled in this case by AT&T or even in, it’s a really big, enterprise customers that give them the ability to set switching rules, which we implement on their behalf.
And secondly, the number one thing that we see that people always underestimate is the importance of the device. And I always say, why was that? And I know this podcast in particular will probably get by far and away the greatest number of listeners just because the nature of the content. But people who have been listening, regularly, will know that we are pretty much every podcast we’ve always said is that the device is hugely important, how you set the firmware, how you optimize the firmware, SMARTconnect, as you say, being a device resident application, where almost like the switching rules to do 5G, the switching rules are almost from the device out as opposed to from the operator through the platform to the device.
Unless you actually have deep device expertise then you cannot do global connectivity. People still think they have the iPhone or the Samsung device in their head, and they think it’s what you get a SIM in? And that’s connectivity. But the device is hard. I always used to joke; I blame the original SaaS guys.
The cloud guys said hardware is not important anymore. It’s all about software because hardware is in the cloud and as a result of which people think that you take the hardware for granted because it’s somewhere else. But in IoT, there is no such thing as a standard SKU, a standard firmware library.
And therefore, without the ability to have device expertise, which is very difficult to get a hold of. We bought a hardware company, and we have our own firmware teams. But without that ability you actually can’t do the device optimization, which is getting more and more critical as more, as 80 percent of applications go to the edge.
It’s actually becoming more about the hardware. I think it was Andreessen who says “software is going to eat hardware”. Maybe he needs to modify that in terms of IoT. Because we’re all about the device.
Mike Van Horn:
We might want to double click on that a little bit. And one of the core pillars of AT&T’s IoT group, platform, portfolio has been our device certification program, we have been doing device certifications for IoT since the beginning. And it comes down to, yes, you want it fast. So do we, but you want it to work and we’re going to make sure not only does it work, but it protects the other devices on our network.
And he can have a lot of rogue consequences, signalling storms and things like that. We take those extra steps to make sure that devices are going to work well on the network. So, I think in that way, our thinking AT&T’s and Eseye’s are very similar.
Nick Earle:
There’s some research on our website.
We did a survey; we think it’s the largest survey in IoT. It was 1500 enterprises, medium to large. But it was a very particular filter. It was enterprises who had attempted to implement IoT. And, had some issues.
They’re the people you want to talk to. When we asked them in retrospect, when you look back at your IoT project, what was the hardest single thing that you completely underestimated? The thing that actually caused your project to go into the mud?
They said, “I totally underestimated the importance of the device.” And so, the customers unfortunately find out the hard way because you might be two years into your project. And absolutely, I think it’s a shared value between us as two companies, in our qualification criteria, we say look we’re going to tell you about the device.
You might not like what we’re going to say. But you have to go slow to go fast, and this is why. And it is an education. I think people are gradually getting it. The device expertise is not just about the connectivity. So, let’s put the technology to one side and go, not around AT&T and Eseye but your customers.
You have a few thousand IoT customers. You have a big IoT salesforce looking after those customers. And your customers, as you said earlier, are some of the largest companies in the world. They are clearly exporting all over the world. From your customer’s point of view, I know you’ve been engaged and already talking to many customers in advance of this formal launch.
How do you position the benefits to them of what it is that we’re announcing here today?
Mike Van Horn:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And this product was really born out of requests and requirements of our customers. Those customers said, “I want a single SKU, a single eSIM, a single portal to manage, a single bill, a single contract.”
What we’re finding is that even some of the larger companies who have those big departments that do their telco management, they’re seeing the benefits of this as well and saying, “Hey, there may be some efficiencies for me. It may be better performance. It may be faster deployments. It may be operational savings and efficiencies.”
And so, what we have here is a product that works really well for customers of all sizes. Whether it be a startup who’s got a great product, who’s starting to scale, or a huge multinational conglomerate that’s already shipping devices all over and just wants to improve their processes and their economics.
This product fits well for them. That’s why we’re excited.
Nick Earle:
As I’ve mentioned, we’ve not only been talking for a while, but we’ve also been talking to customers. I think we first engaged with a customer in October.
So that’s about six months or so. This isn’t something that we intend to do. We’ve been hammering out the details of this with multiple trips to Atlanta and meeting more people, then putting charts on the world with the AT&T organization chart so we could work out who we were talking to and things like that.
We’ve both been in the industry a while. We’ve seen a lot of announcements that are alliances. And then a year later, it’s whatever happened to that? But we’ve been engaged with customers for a little while, haven’t we?
Mike Van Horn:
I’ve seen those announcements too. And eSIM in particular has been ripe with a number of announcements. I’ve got eSIM, I’ve got iSIM. And when you start to peel things back, it’s like what do you really have? It was important for us before doing any press or announcements to get with customers and start deployments.
And experience through the eyes of the customer what that looks like. This is real. This is beyond a paper PR moment. This is, something our customers are already starting to benefit from. And we expect it to take off from here.
Nick Earle:
It’s really the start. We certainly see the opportunity to create a value-based platform as being the big opportunity. And there’s a lot of value-added services that people want that can be enabled. We see this is almost like a base platform to build a catalogue of value-added services across many operators.
And I know you share that vision of really wanting this to be a value-based solution for your business.
Mike Van Horn:
Yep, absolutely. So, when you get the connectivity right, seamless, simple, robust, resilient, you can start to do some even more innovative things. But if you’re fighting to keep a device connected when it moves from one part of a country to another, it’s tough to build on top of that.
And to your point, I see this as we’re getting the connectivity for all of our customers, whether you’re a global SIM or Global SIM Advanced customer now we can add additional services. Things like integration with your major software providers to help beyond connectivity but do some forms of device management or some forms of operational efficiencies. And so, I think you can start to go beyond connectivity and really provide value with the feature, service and capability that you’re able to provide.
Nick Earle:
And beyond cellular because I know I’ve been directly engaged in some of the early people evaluating this, we sometimes think the world is cellular, but actually cellular is 13 percent of all connectivity. And there’s a lot of other types of connectivity out there.
There are private networks, big companies, like the mines. A lot of these have their own network and only when they leave the mine, they go into cellular. So, the switching between public private. There’s the satellite, which is getting there and it’s only going to expand in the future.
There’s obviously WiFi EV chargers that need to toggle between WiFi or vending machines. If WiFi is available, use that. If not, choose cellular, But I want to actually choose based on signal strength and latency. So more advanced switching rules. And the role of AI, the last podcast I did was on the role of AI to get granularity of the switching rules.
So, the idea of all connectivity, agnostic, interoperability. Not just between operators, but also interoperability between different connection types, RAT types, as they’re known. There’s so much more that we could bring together in this industry, which is pretty fragmented, but from a customer point of view, they just want connectivity of any type.
They want the data and how we get the data is sometimes what we talk a lot about in the industry, but from the customer’s point of view, they see it as. I just want the data from every device because every device is going to be connected and it’s going to be all about the data. This is a springboard, this is a platform, because that’s part of the architectural roadmap, a platform to go in that direction.
And I know that’s a vision that you strongly share.
Mike Van Horn:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re always going to be focused on fibre and 5G. That’s the core of who AT&T is but being able to offer a platform that can support all of those different connectivity technology types and make the experience seamless for customers is really attractive.
And another reason why we picked Eseye as collaborators.
Nick Earle:
Mike, I’m going to leave it there. I’m going to finish the way I started, which is to say this, recording has really borne it out that this was the podcast I was waiting for a long time. I’m so glad that we got there.
This is a series of parts of the announcement. I think it will get a lot of people listening to it and viewing it. I think it’s going to cause quite a bit of a buzz in the industry because this is an indication of the future.
You mentioned Jodi, the Federation or the Star Alliance model, the idea of operators collaborating together, sharing capabilities and platforms. And having switching rules that are completely agnostic between roaming and localization based on the use case is really revolutionary and disruptive and is going to provide so much more choice and capabilities for customers, which I think is going to become a huge driver to the edge, with that hardware expertise that you mentioned. Thanks for the collaboration so far. I’m still reeling at your answer earlier when I asked you why you chose Eseye is when you immediately said, “because I love you guys.”
Mike Van Horn:
Yeah. Oh, I said the L word. I know. I don’t say that lightly. Y’all have been through it with us and, we appreciate you and looking forward to it. Sky’s the limit, from here on. Looking forward to successful customer deployments together.
Outro:
You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders, featuring top digitization leadership on the frontlines of IoT. We hope today’s episode has sparked new ideas and inspired your IoT and digital transformation plans. Thanks for listening. Until next time!
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