Vodafone Czech Republic has introduced the new prepaid service IoT Easy Connect. The service can support IoT services for up to 10 years.

The new IoT Easy Connect SIM includes a 1 GB data bundle and 250 SMS on the 2G network for CZK 449.00 (US $19.94). Additional data traffic can be purchased via the Easy Connect portal. After 10 years, the SIM will be deactivated.

Industrial SIMs resistant to extreme conditions are offered for users of the service.

Tarifica’s Take

In their quest for new revenue streams, MNOs have been spending a great deal of effort on developing IoT clients. The rapid expansion of connected devices, particularly in the industrial sector, has driven demand for IoT services, at a variety of levels of sophistication and power. Some are complex and data-hungry, requiring great bandwidth, while others are simple and require little data speed. Many of these latter are very basic monitoring and control systems that are left running long-term.

Vodafone Czech Republic’s IoT Easy Connect is of this type. An inexpensive SIM that runs on 2G is likely to be very satisfactory for those “set it and forget it” types of applications that are common in industrial systems. The maximum-10-year-long duration of the prepaid plan is appropriate to the devices that will be served, and it makes sense to prepay because the amount of data the devices use is not likely to change over time.

For Vodafone, this plan is not high-value on a per-connected-device basis, but enterprise clients will have a large number of devices that need to be connected to IoT, and therefore this is a volume business. And the duration of the SIMs means that this plan is a way of locking in revenue for a long period of time. Therefore, it is a highly desirable plan for both customers and operators.