How IoT tracks global assets affordably

How IoT tracks global assets affordably

It was once the case that a multinational's offshore offices and assets could only be managed by local staff. Now, the Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly democratising international oversight by allowing machine to talk to machine (M2M).

So a company could check, for instance, how its company cars are being run – are they still fuel-efficient, for instance, or is a certain staffer's mileage excessive and so risking a driver fatigue related accident?

Or they can see if expensive devices – like photocopiers, printers and computer servers – are precisely where they should be. And with smart meters they can find out if the Boston office, say, is eating ten times the electricity of the Amsterdam one. 

Predicting and controlling business costs

But the fact is your company will have to pay top dollar for the privilege of adopting such a solution. Here's why: most IoT/M2M systems use a tracking or monitoring device that uses a regular SIM card to send its logged data to a backend M2M server at the company's base – with a cost to the business.

It works just like a regular cell phone: incurring roaming charges whenever the asset – such as a car, van or truck - moves from one network to another. That means you are in the business of coping with a thicket of regional cell phone companies and their widely varying tariffs – and it becomes a nightmare to predict and control the costs.

With a Truphone IoT-specific "FastSIM" card in the asset, however, things are very different. Like its global cell phone network counterpart, the FastSIM device automatically senses its location when switched on and connects to a local Truphone partner network - in no less than 66 countries. So the IoT device is seen as just another local subscriber – with all the high signal quality and cost benefits that brings.

This also makes it easy for firms to reallocate assets from one country to another: if a car or a photocopier is moved from, say, a Berlin office to London, the FastSIM simply connects to the London Truphone affiliate on startup – so there's no need for fiddly SIM changes to be undertaken.

By allowing machine to talk to machine affordably, Truphone can allow companies to acquire a whole lot of actionable infrastructure knowledge they never had before – and get it with unimaginable ease.

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