The business and operational model of the telco is the number 1 impediment to telcos realising new revenues and avoiding marginalisation/commoditisation. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Internet of Things. The future world with its 50B+ connected devices is frequently referred to as a huge opportunity for telco. However, the challenge with IoT devices is that they do not behave like a mobile phone, will possibly have 50M+ different use cases/business models, and that without the ability to adapt to non-telephony use cases and business models, the role of the telco rapidly retreats to providing commoditised bandwidth and connectivity. Dean Bubley’s post on the mTeddyBear nicely summarised the dilemma for the telco with the traditional SIM based subscriber business model breaking down when confronted with a device which is a teddy bear not a phone. An existing IoT business, MooCall, illustrates some of the problems and opportunities in IoT for a telco. MooCall is a device, attached to a cow’s tail, that monitors her tail movements and detects patterns that indicate an imminent birth. When this is detected an SMS is sent to the farmer to take appropriate action. Vodafone provides network connectivity to MooCall based on a Global SIM. MooCall is a really neat piece of IoT developed by a farmer for farmers. But let’s unpack […]