Cisco announced at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona advancements to its IoT portfolio to help its service provider customers offer a simpler way to manage LPWAN, 4G and 5G IoT connectivity.

As industries look to evolve their digital strategies in support of hybrid work, they need simplified ways to connect and manage low-cost, often-stationary devices deployed at massive scale (mass IoT), such as utility meters, medical devices and agricultural sensors.

Introduced at MWC, the Cisco IoT control centre fulfils industry needs for mass IoT with a simplified and secure connectivity management package purpose-built for lower complexity IoT devices. The control centre manages nearly 200 million devices today, across all licensed cellular networks (LPWAN, 4G and 5G), giving operators and enterprises the flexibility to choose the network that works best for their use case.

With low bandwidth consumption and predictable usage patterns, stationary devices are often connected over wide areas with 3GPP LPWANs. LPWAN supports a broad range of IoT use cases from a water meter that sends a burst of data once a week, to a city parking meter that handles transactions throughout the day and night. Remote management for these devices is less complex than those requiring continuous, real-time, mission critical data collection such as connected cars.

With control centre, delivered as a subscription service, service providers can address the full range of enterprise use cases from low-to-high complexity from a single platform. It reduces connectivity management complexity and costs without compromising quality, making it practical and profitable for service providers to drive new revenue streams and capitalise on mass IoT market opportunities.

“We are always looking for ways to make IoT more valuable and easier to use for our customers, and now Cisco enables KPN IoT to profitably capitalise on LPWAN market opportunities via the IoT control centre,” said Carolien Nijhuis, executive vice president at KPN. “Offering our enterprise customers a single platform to address the full range of IoT use cases is a great advantage and reduces complexity in our customer’s deployments, leverages existing integrations and improves cost efficiency.”

Marc Overton, managing director at BT’s enterprise business, added: “We are very pleased to see the new mass IoT capabilities available on the IoT control centre platform. These will enable the pursuit of emerging low-cost, low-complexity IoT segments, with a solution that better meets customers’ needs.”

And Masum Mir, vice president at Cisco, said: “We strive to help our service provider customers enable new services and business outcomes for mass IoT to simplify data collection from millions of devices. With these enhancements to Cisco IoT control centre, our customers can expand into the LPWAN market using a proven platform to help a broad range of growing industries realise what the future of mobile IoT can do to transform their business.”