The global IoT player, majority owned by KDDI, wants to help unify the fragmented connected car sector through standards for activating and managing SIM profiles
Soracom has unveiled its global strategy for the connected car industry and claims it is on a mission to help address the numerous connectivity and cloud management challenges the sector faces. The company is well positioned to do so given it is a connectivity solution that offers a global IoT platform with full MVNO capability.
The connected car ecosystem has encountered roadblocks raised by the numerous backend processes and relationships automakers, dealerships, connectivity providers, and consumers must navigate to bring connected cars up to speed. These challenges include the process of activating and managing SIM profiles on end devices; supporting flexibility in establishing and managing connectivity at the local level; ensuring end-to-end security; and efficiently integrating with connected car clouds to support the various features and infotainment content waiting to be unlocked.
Soracom reckons it’s heard these issues before. These obstacles mirror those faced by the global IoT ecosystem, where Soracom’s cloud-native cellular core supports global multicarrier coverage, private fibre peering, VPNs and integration with various cloud services without the need for SDKs.
“The connected car journey has been like a long family road trip, with the kids continually asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ The good news is we are almost there – but for connected car services to succeed, the process of enabling them needs to be simple, secure, and scalable – for automakers, for dealerships, for connectivity providers, and most of all, for consumers,” said Soracom co-founder and CTO Kenta Yasukawa.
Enter GSMA
A key aim of Soracom’s new Connected Car strategy is to support the GSMA SGP.32 eSIM remote provisioning and management standard. This IoT eSIM standard, which is expected to be completed this year and available in products starting in 2025, allows automakers, dealerships, and consumers more flexibility in activating connected car connectivity.
Before SGP.32, even if each car was equipped with an eSIM and a modem, the automotive manufacturer had to work with a different connectivity provider in each country where its vehicles were sold, and ask their primary carrier to integrate with their remote subscription management server to facilitate localisation of eSIMs, requiring time-consuming negotiations and a complex backend integration process with each carrier.
“This is hard enough to do with one carrier in one country, let alone with every carrier for every vehicle model and every model year in every country,” said Yasukawa. “All the negotiations and backend integration required can take months to set up and years to manage.”
In contrast, Soracom offers a software-based, globally distributed infrastructure through Amazon Web Services that provides a direct link from the connected car to the cloud through its cloud-native cellular core and an on-demand virtual private gateway. As an MVNO, Soracom is a major provider of both SIM cards and eSIMs, the embedded SIM chips that will likely be deployed in the next generation connected cars.
Integrating an eSIM with SGP32 embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC), into a vehicle modem makes it work as originally expected without complex backend carrier integration. While keeping secure, private connection to their backend systems, automakers gain the flexibility to push eUICC profiles for infotainment and in-car wifi down to vehicles with their preferred carrier already in place. Alternatively, they can allow dealerships or connected car users to pull the carrier profile of their choice from the manufacturer’s cloud. In either case, the automotive manufacturer is relieved of a costly and laborious process.
“As a vehicle manufacturer or buyer, you should drive your own car’s connectivity, not be driven by a connectivity provider,” said Yasukawa. “With flexible SGP.32 eSIM provisioning and management, you are no longer captive to negotiating pre-market integrations with carriers that are difficult to change or update.”
Soracom can issue an eUICC profile compatible with SGP.22 and SGP.32 via API, and is ready to support SGP.32-compatible eSIMs. In addition, the company can provide the SGP.32-compatible eSIM and network-side enablers so that automakers can download their own carrier profiles or set up a portal to allow dealerships or car buyers to do so. If eSIMs are obtained elsewhere, Soracom said it can still provide global network connectivity, including cellular and satellite leveraging their 3GPP NTN capability to vehicles.
Now for the industry
Soracom said it is working aggressively to get involved in the automotive sector’s new product cycles at an early stage. The company has conducted proof-of-concept projects with automotive manufacturers, and is a member of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC), the global industry body helping to define the converged computing and network architecture to support a new generation of connected car capabilities.
“Enabling connected cars is a team sport,” said Yasukawa. “Working together, we can build a simple, secure, and scalable cloud highway for connected cars.”
The global IoT provider’s decision to back the GSMA standard carries weight as well given its connectivity platform offers access to 417 carriers across 182 countries through virtualised cellular cores deployed in multiple AWS regions. This eases the backend complexity that automakers otherwise encounter as they negotiate with different carriers and dealerships in different countries as they set up connected car services from their clouds.