By Mikk Lemberg, Chief Product Officer, 1oT
Imagine an enterprise customer whose IoT pilot works. Coverage is good, pricing is agreed, and you are discussing the next deployment. Then the order slips. Its engineers are busy integrating another operator and figuring out how support will manage devices across both.
You have the connectivity to serve more devices. Your customer doesn’t have the capacity to deploy them. I think that’s the growth problem worth understanding: every week the customer’s engineers spend sorting out connectivity is a week they can’t spend improving the product that earns their revenue. Features wait. Hardware launches slip. Another market stays on next year’s roadmap.
Your volume cap is their ops budget.
Now imagine that customer entering another market with a tested setup, familiar management tools, and someone responsible when things go wrong. Its engineers have more time for the product customers actually buy. For a manufacturer committing hardware to the field for ten years, that tested setup isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the reason committing to one operator now feels safe instead of reckless. And if the product succeeds, more connections follow.
This is where the next phase of IoT eSIM growth will come from.
IoT and eSIM sit at the heart of MVNO Nation Europe 2026. From SGP.32 realities to enterprise deployment friction, hear it debated live in Alicante. Register your delegate pass →
Switching Is the Easy Part
SGP.32 gives the industry a common foundation for managing operator profiles remotely. We’re building that infrastructure ourselves right now, and implementations across the market are underway. But watching it happen up close has convinced me the work around a profile switch matters more than the switch itself.
A device can download a profile and reconnect successfully while leaving its owner with another integration project. Usage records may sit in a different portal. Existing alerts stop working. Support needs another supplier’s help to investigate a fault. SGP.32 doesn’t automatically carry those operational systems across on its own. Its components have to work together on the customer’s hardware, and operator integrations have to provide the information needed to run the service.
I don’t think the enterprise buying connectivity ever audits how many components sit behind an MVNO’s SGP.32 stack. What it notices, every week, is how many hours its own team spends managing that stack.
That gives us the operators a practical way to decide where to invest.
Remove the Workload, Not Just the Lock-In
Pick an existing customer whose expansion has stalled. Map the connectivity work required for its next deployment and identify who must do it. Find the task that takes the most customer effort or prevents the launch.
Then decide how your service could take responsibility for it.
Perhaps the customer needs a hardware combination you have already tested. Perhaps changing the operator means rebuilding usage reporting. Or perhaps every support incident requires the customer to bring several suppliers onto a call.
You may need to build something. You may need a better integration or a clearer agreement with a partner. The choice should follow the obstacle you are removing.
Test the result in the next deployment. Did the customer spend fewer engineering hours on connectivity? Could it reach production sooner? Those answers tell you more about the value of your service than another capability on a slide.
Want to compare notes with peers who are actually removing enterprise workload? See the 2026 agenda →
Choice Is Only Useful If Your Customer Can Afford to Use It
At 1oT, building both eSIM infrastructure and connectivity management keeps bringing me back to how much work we leave with the customer. Providing a choice is only useful if the customer can afford to exercise it.
Go back to the customer whose next order slipped. What connectivity work is still sitting on its engineering roadmap — and which part could you take responsibility for? Give that team more time to build a product people want. That’s a better foundation for connection growth than asking it to get better at managing connectivity.
Continue the conversation at MVNO Nation Europe 2026
IoT, eSIM, SGP.32 and enterprise growth are among the biggest themes on this year’s agenda. Join Mikk Lemberg and 500+ MVNO leaders, MNOs, enablers and suppliers in Alicante, 3–5 November 2026, at Meliá Villaitana.
