Internet of Things: Pay once, use over ten years
Europe’s first data flat rate for the Internet of Things is now available online. The joint offering by Deutsche Telekom and 1NCE, now available under the name 1NCE Lifetime Fee, is designed especially for business customers. It provides connectivity for devices using low data volumes in the Internet of Things (or IoT). The prepaid rates can now be booked from the 1NCE webshop.
For a one-off price of ten euros, customers receive a SIM card with a data volume of 500 MB and 250 SMS messaging for use in the Internet of Things. This will normally be enough to cover the entire lifetime of up to ten years of such connected devices. If the data volume purchased is used up before the end of the device’s lifetime, the customer can top up with additional data packages. The rate also includes the right to use 1NCE’s cloud platform for managing active SIM cards.
The offering is aimed especially at business customers whose devices transmit only small amounts of data at irregular intervals. Operators of vehicle fleets, Page 2 of 3 energy suppliers and logistic service providers, for example, can benefit from the seamless connection between technologies using different mobile communication standards such as 2G/3G and NarrowBand IoT (or NB-IoT for short). This allows 1NCE to provide the right level of connectivity for the requirements of a variety of different sectors. To facilitate this, Deutsche Telekom is making available the capacities of the machine and sensor network that forms part of its 5G system. The offering will initially cover the European Union together with Norway and Switzerland.
The market for IoT is booming
Coming after the completion of initial projects with European test customers from the transport, logistics, energy, security and manufacturing sectors, the launch of the webshop is set to witness the beginning of a new period of growth: “The market for connected objects that require only limited bandwidths is set to grow rapidly in the next few years, as ever more sectors begin to deploy new IoT-based service offerings,” says Alexander P. Sator, founder and CEO of 1NCE. “With our product, we intend to contribute to the on-going development of this future market by making existing solutions substantially more efficient at the same time as facilitating entirely new use cases in the Internet of Things for which there were no suitable offerings up to now”, Sator tells us.
Deutsche Telekom is extending its product range for business customers in the IoT area to include 1NCE’s new value-for-money offering. “The Internet of Things is increasingly allowing businesses to further professionalize their operations and place even more emphasis on their customer relationship. That effort will lead both to increased revenue and increased profitability”, says Hagen Rickmann, Director for Business Customers at Telekom Deutschland. “Our ‘ten euros for ten years’ price model provides the preconditions to allow businesses to achieve these goals efficiently.