American telecom operator AT&T today announced the launch of Global SIM card targeting the connected devices (M2M) market.
Its single SIM solution meets the new GSMA specifications for the use of multiple operator profiles on a single SIM, said AT&T.
AT&T said the new single SIM solution from AT&T Mobility will assist multi-national companies to wirelessly connect, manage and support connected and M2M devices around the world.
“Global SIM enables the internet of things for companies that need to connect devices, machines, or cars with a single platform around the world,” said Chris Penrose, senior vice president, AT&T Emerging Devices.
With this, AT&T will become the first carrier to announce a global SIM designed to meet GSMA specifications.
Besides AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient, Morpho, NTT DOCOMO, Oberthur, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor and Vodafone are actively looking at the M2M market.
AT&T said the enhanced global SIM is available in select markets.
M2M a booming market
The number of mobile connected devices is expected to increase by 100 percent to nearly 12 billion by 2020, resulting in a huge new market opportunity, predominantly in the machine to machine (M2M) and consumer electronics sectors, said GSMA in an earlier statement.
GSMA earlier warned that all parties in the M2M ecosystem will struggle if they remain solely dependent upon the traditional SIM card, which is predicated on only associating with one network operator.
This is because changing SIM cards is problematical for many business-to-business (B2B) customers, when noting that many M2M devices are remotely located, often hermetically sealed, their after sale location is not known during production and furthermore their product life cycles are lengthy, said GSMA.
Baburajan K
