Good afternoon, readers.
A new Soracom, Inc. announcement dropped this morning, y’all. So, let’s dip into a quick refresher about the company before diving into today’s announcement.
Soracom is a prominent provider of advanced IoT connectivity solutions. Founded back in 2015, Soracom has since championed myriad global interconnectivity products and services, remaining very active in key IoT verticals. Currently a partner to “more than 20,000 startups, SMBs and other enterprises” (a quote from the company itself), Soracom’s solutions are specifically designed to make building, operating and scaling IoT deployments exceptionally simple.
Take a look below at some of our past Soracom coverage:
- Plan X3-EU cellular IoT data bundle, starting at €4.50 for 25MB/month
- Plan-US for IoT, in partnership with UScellular
- Achieving Visionary status, courtesy of a Gartner 2023 evaluation
Now, here’s what’s been announced as of today:
Soracom has shared its latest global strategy for the connected car industry.
See, by addressing challenges related to connectivity woes and cloud management, Soracom hopes to empower automotive customers with a.) more flexibility, and b.) greater freedom of choice to decide how they’d like to roll out connected car services — this, ideally, would put more connected cars on the road (that are safer and more effective, to boot). With experience already banked in supporting secure, cloud-native, global-scale cellular IoT connectivity needs, Soracom hopes to take on a larger, more important role in scaling the connected car ecosystem.
Notably, this ecosystem is already facing challenges that all but mirror those faced by the global IoT ecosystem; activating and managing SIM profiles, supporting flexibility in establishing and managing connectivity at the local level, ensuring end-to-end security and efficiently integrating with connected clouds to support cutting-edge features.
And in the general IoT ecosystem, at least, Soracom’s cost-effective cellular core supports global multicarrier coverage, private fiber peering, VPNs, and integration with various cloud services.
So, can Soracom achieve this for automotive?
Kenta Yasukawa, Ph.D, CTO and co-founder of Soracom, very much believes so.
“The connected car journey has been like a long family road trip, with the kids continually asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ So while we are almost there, the process of making them simpler, more secure and more accessible for automakers, dealerships, connectivity and — most of all — for consumers must be addressed,” Yasukawa explained.
“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,” Yasukawa added. “All the negotiations and backend integration required can take months to set up and years to manage. But as a vehicle manufacturer or buyer, you should ‘drive’ your own car’s connectivity, not be driven ‘by’ one provider. That is why enabling connected cars at scale is a team sport. By working together with manufacturers and other like-minded AECC members, we can build a simple, secure, and scalable cloud highway for connected cars.”
Read more about Soracom’s announcement here.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
