The GSMA finalised SGP.32 in 2023.
The ink was barely dry before the industry started calling it the future of IoT connectivity. Zero-touch deployment. Remote provisioning at scale. The death of the SIM swap.
All true. But the conversation usually stops there.
What it doesn’t discuss is what SGP.32 does to the industry behind it. The resellers, the sub-MVNOs, the aggregators sitting in the middle of the connectivity stack who built their businesses on SIM logistics and margin. The corporate procurement teams who’ve spent years negotiating per-SIM contracts. The end users who’ve been told eSIM means cheaper, simpler, better – and are still waiting.
This post is about what actually happens next. Not the specification. The commercial and structural reality of what a maturing eSIM ecosystem means for everyone in the chain.
Where We Actually Are with SGP.32
Before the future, the present.
SGP.32 is real. It is shipping. But “the ecosystem is maturing” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in most eSIM coverage right now.
Device-side support is the bottleneck. The specification was finalised in 2023, and chipset vendors moved quickly – Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Nordic Semiconductor all announced SGP.32-capable modules within twelve months of ratification. But silicon availability and certified device availability are different things. The certification pipeline takes time, and the industrial IoT hardware cycle is measured in years, not months.
The honest picture at the time of writing: SGP.32-capable devices are available and deployable today for new projects with the right hardware specification. Legacy devices – anything designed before 2023 – will overwhelmingly be SGP.22 or SGP.02. That installed base is enormous and it doesn’t disappear.
ABI Research’s forecast of 194 million SGP.32 profile downloads by 2029 is directionally credible. The trajectory is steep because the baseline is low and because volume IoT deployments – the smart metering rollouts, the connected infrastructure projects, the logistics and fleet management platforms – will adopt SGP.32 as the standard for new hardware from 2025 onward.
The transition is real. The timeline is longer than the press releases suggest.
The Consolidation That’s Already Happened
Here’s what the eSIM market coverage doesn’t tell you: the consolidation isn’t coming. It already started. The M&A activity of the last five years in the MVNO and IoT connectivity space is the clearest signal of where this ends up.
Cisco acquired Jasper Technologies in 2016 for $1.4 billion. At the time it looked like a connectivity management play. In retrospect it was Cisco buying the SM-DP+ and IoT connectivity management layer before most of the market understood why that mattered. Jasper’s platform now underpins Cisco IoT Control Center – one of the most widely deployed connectivity management platforms in enterprise IoT.
NTT acquired Transatel in 2019. Transatel operated one of Europe’s more capable multi-network MVNO platforms, with genuine multi-operator SIM capability and an established eSIM portfolio. NTT bought connectivity platform depth, not just a customer book.
Tele2 acquired Eseye in 2021. Eseye had built a strong position in IoT eSIM – multi-network SIMs, a capable SM-DP+ platform, and a genuine technology story. Tele2’s IoT division acquired them to absorb that platform capability rather than build it. The message was clear: if you don’t own the platform layer, you’re a target.
Thales acquired Gemalto in 2019 for €4.8 billion. Gemalto was one of the world’s largest SIM manufacturers and had significant eSIM intellectual property. Thales bought deep into the secure element and SIM supply chain. The combined entity is now one of the primary SM-DP+ platform operators globally.
The pattern is consistent. Large strategic acquirers – network operators, technology platforms, defence and security conglomerates – are buying the SM-DP+ platform layer and multi-network capability. The targets are companies that built genuine technical depth in eSIM orchestration. The companies not being acquired are the ones with no platform to buy.
What Happens to Resellers Below MVNO Level
This is the uncomfortable part of the eSIM story that nobody in the channel wants to discuss directly.
The traditional IoT SIM distribution model looked like this:
MNO – MVNO – Sub-MVNO / Reseller – End customer
Each layer added some value – coverage aggregation, commercial packaging, customer relationships, technical support – and took a margin. The SIM was the product. Stocking it, shipping it, managing the logistics of physical deployment – that was the value add for a lot of businesses in the middle of that chain.
SGP.32 removes the physical deployment step entirely.
There is no SIM to stock. No SIM to ship. No engineer visit to swap a SIM when a network change is needed. The profile is pushed over the air. The entire logistics layer – the thing that justified a lot of channel margin – evaporates.
What’s left?
For resellers who built their business on SIM logistics, the answer is: not much that isn’t being automated away. The connectivity itself becomes a commodity. 1NCE demonstrated this as early as 2017 with their flat-rate model – €10 for a SIM with 500MB of lifetime data, valid for ten years. No per-month charges. No contracts. A race to the bottom on pure connectivity pricing that exposed how thin the margin was on SIM distribution alone.
The resellers who survive the transition are the ones who answer a different question. Not “can I get you a SIM?” but “can I manage your entire connected device estate?” That means:
- Device lifecycle management, not just SIM provisioning
- Integration with customer IoT platforms and management systems
- Multi-network SLA management – not just selling data, but guaranteeing performance
- The professional services layer: deployment architecture, security policy, compliance
The value moves up the stack. Resellers who move with it survive. Resellers who don’t become a more expensive version of something customers can buy directly from an MVNO platform.
The 1NCE effect is worth studying. When a startup can offer ten years of IoT connectivity for a one-time fee of €10, the implicit message to every reseller in the chain is this: the connectivity itself is worth almost nothing. What you charge for had better be something else.
What Happens to Costs for End Users
The deflationary pressure on connectivity pricing is real and it’s structural, not cyclical.
The cost drivers are:
Platform amortisation. Building and operating an SM-DP+ platform is expensive. Those costs are fixed. As volume scales, the per-device cost of eSIM management falls significantly. The MVNO and aggregator players who invested early in platform infrastructure are positioned to pass those savings on competitively as volume grows.
Multi-network leverage. With SGP.32, a device can be provisioned with the optimal network for its location and application – not just the network whose SIM happened to be in the box at manufacture. That shifts commercial leverage toward the buyer. Operators competing for profile provisioning on the same device estate is a fundamentally different dynamic to operators competing for SIM orders.
Elimination of truck rolls. The cost of physically visiting a device to swap a SIM – in industrial deployments this can run to hundreds of pounds per intervention – disappears. That’s a direct operational saving that flows to end users once they’re past the transition.
The catch: the transition itself is not free. Migrating an existing device estate to eSIM – particularly SGP.32 – requires hardware investment. Devices without eUICC support cannot be remotely provisioned regardless of what the SM-DP+ platform can do. For large installed bases of legacy hardware, the economics of migration have to be weighed against the operational savings of remote management. That calculation often delays adoption.
For corporate IoT – the enterprise customers deploying hundreds or thousands of connected devices – the commercial model shifts from per-SIM contracts to platform access agreements. The procurement conversation changes from “what’s your SIM price per month?” to “what does your management platform do and what’s the SLA?” That’s a more sophisticated procurement conversation, and not all enterprise buyers are ready for it yet.
For the IoT marketplace – the SaaS platforms, the telematics providers, the smart building and smart metering companies – eSIM becomes a competitive differentiator. The ability to offer connectivity-included solutions with remote lifecycle management built in, rather than requiring customers to source their own SIMs, is a genuine product advantage. Expect eSIM to become a standard element of IoT platform propositions within three to five years.
The Real Benefits of SGP.32 in Production
Away from the analyst forecasts, here’s what SGP.32 actually delivers in a real deployment:
Zero-touch commissioning. A device can leave the factory with an eSIM profile pre-loaded, ship to any location globally, and connect automatically on arrival. No QR code. No engineer visit. No SIM to insert. For a logistics company deploying 10,000 asset trackers across twelve countries, that’s not a nice-to-have – it’s the difference between a viable and an unviable deployment model.
Post-deployment network flexibility. If the network a device is provisioned on degrades, is discontinued, or becomes uncompetitive, you change the profile. Remotely. Without touching the hardware. This is particularly valuable in long-lifecycle deployments – infrastructure sensors, smart meters, industrial equipment – where the device might be in the field for ten to fifteen years and the cellular landscape will change significantly over that period.
Simplified global deployment. A single hardware SKU works globally. No region-specific SIM configurations, no customs complications around SIM cards crossing borders, no per-country provisioning logistics. The profile follows the device’s location.
Reduced RMA overhead. A significant proportion of device returns in IoT deployments are connectivity-related – wrong SIM, wrong network, provisioning failure. Remote profile management eliminates most of the physical swap scenarios that drive those returns.
Cubic Telecom is a useful real-world reference here. They manage connected vehicle eSIM deployments for major automotive OEMs across multiple continents. The ability to push local carrier profiles to vehicles as they move between markets – without a dealer visit, without a SIM swap – is the entire value proposition. That model doesn’t work at all without SGP.32-grade remote provisioning.
What Comes After SGP.32
SGP.32 is not the end point. It’s the platform on which the next phase is built.
iSIM is the architectural step that makes the SIM disappear entirely as a discrete component. Where eUICC integrates the secure element into an embedded chip, iSIM integrates it directly into the application processor or system-on-chip. ARM’s TrustZone architecture provides the secure execution environment. The SIM functionality runs in a trusted zone within the same silicon that runs the application.
The implications are significant. Smaller form factors – enabling connected devices that couldn’t accommodate even an MFF2 chip. Lower power consumption. Reduced BOM cost. And no separate SIM component to source, certify, or manage.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series modems include iSIM capability. Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF9160 – widely deployed in IoT applications – integrates the SIM directly. The hardware shift is already underway.
Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) are the other major variable. 3GPP Release 17 defined NTN support for cellular standards, enabling direct satellite-to-device connectivity using standard cellular protocols. What this means in practice: a device with a 5G or LTE modem can connect to a satellite network without any hardware modification – the same modem, the same SIM, switching between terrestrial and satellite coverage as needed.
SpaceX Starlink’s direct-to-device programme, AST SpaceMobile’s broadband constellation, and Lynk Global’s satellite SMS service are all commercialising variations of this model. The eSIM and iSIM layer is what enables seamless handover between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks – a single profile managing connectivity across both.
For IoT specifically, NTN closes the coverage gap that has always been the ceiling on cellular IoT deployments. Remote infrastructure, maritime, agricultural, environmental monitoring – applications where terrestrial coverage is patchy or absent. The combination of SGP.32 remote provisioning and NTN connectivity is what makes genuinely global, zero-touch IoT deployment possible.
The SIM as a physical component tied to a specific network is already an anachronism. The question is how long the transition takes, and who’s positioned on the right side of it when it completes.
That’s a longer conversation – and the subject of the next post in this series.
Credits and Sources
ABI Research – SGP.32 profile download forecasts cited in this article are drawn from ABI Research’s IoT eSIM market analysis (2024).
GSMA – SGP.02, SGP.22 and SGP.32 specification details sourced from GSMA’s published technical specifications. Full documentation at gsma.com.
Acquisition references – Cisco/Jasper (2016), NTT/Transatel (2019), Tele2/Eseye (2021), and Thales/Gemalto (2019) are based on publicly reported transactions. All figures reflect reported deal values at time of announcement.
1NCE – Flat-rate IoT connectivity model referenced from 1NCE’s published commercial offering.
Cubic Telecom – Connected vehicle eSIM deployment referenced from publicly available Cubic Telecom case study material.
Part of the euicc.co.uk series on eUICC, eSIM, and the future of cellular IoT connectivity.