THEPYRAMID: Managed IoT Connectivity Services Market Overview

The Managed IoT Connectivity Services market is a mature market, having been around for decades. As prices for devices and connectivity services continue to decline, more IoT use cases become financially viable, contributing to steady market growth.

In this report, we’re evaluating vendors that provide 3GPP-based (cellular) services predominantly directly to end customers. Three specific areas stand out in our evaluation:

• CMP (Communication Management Platform) capabilities
• Geographic footprint/roaming partnerships
• Vertical competency

Moving forward into 2026, the vendors in this market will need to evolve and excel in the following areas: 

• Support for SGP.32, the new e-SIM standard
• Support for NTN (Non-Terrestrial Networks)
• Managing the ongoing 2G/3G shutdown
• Support for LPWA (NB-IoT, LTE-M, and evolving to RedCap/eRedCap)
• Enabling SPoG (Single Pane of Glass)

More and more providers are moving into an MVNO business model where the focus is on orchestrating network services from a large number of MNOs in a regulatory-compliant and seamlessly integrated way.

Pricing

Models keep evolving to cater to different ways buyers use services. For example, a one-time payment for low data usage use cases is gaining popularity. As such, the following capabilities have now become table stakes:

• Delivering consistent, high-quality communication across devices, networks, and regions.
• Having a partner eco-system supporting key verticals with products and services.
• Being able to fully meet regulatory compliance, like using local SIMs and providing local breakout.

The difference maker for this market is the CMP (Communication Management Platform). Top of the Pyramid vendors differentiate themselves, not just through the quality of the connectivity, but through the ability to provide complete solutions for a use case, together with their ecosystem partners.

In this market, the pyramid illustrates how IoT connectivity providers align with the imperatives of coverage, compliance, and partners.

• The Performance Index reflects platform maturity, proven connectivity service quality, and geographic coverage.
• The Strategic Index considers innovation, technical differentiation, and partnerships — factors that determine how well an IoT connectivity provider can evolve and scale to meet future end-user requirements.

The push by many end-user organizations to become more data-driven, as well as collect more high-quality data for their AI initiatives, will continue to drive more connected data acquisition devices. AIoT, the concept of running AI locally on IoT devices, is opening up a lot of new use cases to become financially viable.