Belgian communications enabler BICS has added borderless 5G capabilities to its SIM for Things so enterprises, OEMs and hardware manufacturers can unlock opportunities with more use cases for connected devices.

BICS is one of the first-to-market with such a turnkey 5G offering. By bringing this additional connectivity to its SIM for Things, enterprise users should benefit from the latest services, with endpoints supported by low-latency, high-speed 5G on a global scale.

SIM for Things supports 5G device connectivity in Canada and Taiwan and plans to add up to 50 locations by the end of 2021. The turnkey global connectivity already supports 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE, LTE-M and NB-IoT, allowing enterprises to access more than 700 mobile networks worldwide, easily switching networks to capitalise on best quality and coverage availability.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the global IoT market is forecast to be valued at $1.38tn by 2026, driven by more than 83 billion connected IoT devices, based on Juniper Research reports. The addition of 5G connectivity should significantly contribute to the growth of IoT, supporting a wide range of applications requiring consistent, reliable and secure managed connectivity in sectors such as logistics, automotive, manufacturing, public safety, security and healthcare.

For example, the enhancement of SIM for Things will enable IoT use cases, such as video surveillance, video calls and in-the-field maintenance of industrial assets video-streamed in real time, relying on the power of 5G networks for data-hungry, ultra-broadband, low latency communications.

SIM for Things comprises a physical and virtual SIM card, equipped with self-management capabilities and real-time quality-of-service data analytics. This allows enterprises seamlessly to deploy and efficiently control thousands and even millions of SIM-embedded endpoints in bulk. It offers reliable borderless connectivity with local multi-network coverage in more than 200 countries, with 5G now added for Canada and Taiwan, and rolling out to other countries throughout the year.

“Connectivity is the foundation of IoT,” said Luc Vidal-Madjar, head of IoT at BICS. “As an enabler of IoT connectivity, it is imperative that we provide a full range of connectivity options that can be tailored to each specific use case. This announcement represents the next step in realising new generation IoT use cases, powering data-hungry devices with high bandwidth 5G. The addition of 5G to our plug-and-play solution is a move that will unlock new capabilities for OEMs and hardware manufacturers, enabling enterprises to continue to innovate in the IoT space for years to come.”