JT is a Tier 1 full services telecoms operator based in Jersey, Channel Islands. The company has the vision to be a premium provider of global wireless data as well as a key platform enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ultimately to be the partner of choice for global telecoms innovation. JT’s approach is to provide connectivity around cellular, Wi-Fi, and LoRa, networks, but importantly, to provide a platform in which the various “molecules” that comprise a compound IoT offering can be provisioned, managed, invoiced and automated. The company does this through 600+ global roaming partners, the NOMAD workflow engine and connectivity management portal. JT’s IoT division demonstrated 128% growth in 2016, and 2017 promises to be equally exciting.
Leaders’ Thoughts
Paul Bullock, JT’s Head of IoT, and Toby Gasston, Head of Service Delivery, started this line of business within JT in 2013. Paul brings perspective from a career in Technical Business Development at every level of the network stack, including startup experience in Canada, Bermuda and Jersey. He believes that network technology is solving countless real world problems, including Co2 emissions, crop yields, assisted living, efficient resource allocation, global income disparity and dozens of others.
M2M and IoT, in particular, demonstrate material improvement in lifestyles and environmental impacts. The team JT has assembled over the past several years is comprised of technical professionals with diverse backgrounds. JT’s recently announced partnership with Copenhagen’s NeoConsult, headed by Rune Bundesen, provides customers a further layer of unrivalled depth in high-end software development capability.
IoT Solutions and Integrations
JT’s IoT capability is a global horizontal connectivity solution, providing an integrated billing and device diagnostic platform. Uniquely, JT’s NOMAD platform delivers multi-network unsteered open roaming for cellular connections. It also provides complete API integration and allows its users to construct, provision, bill and monitor complete IoT solutions. NOMAD is a workflow engine that assembles all the many components of an IoT solution via API to third parties, allowing automated and controlled provisioning of point of sale, building controls, tracking/telemetry, and security solutions. NOMAD also integrates LoRa and Wi-Fi connectivity for “single pane of glass” visibility of hybrid estates.
Globally Dispersed Customers
JT’s customers are global and diverse; everything from direct corporates, to integrators in the UK, USA, Denmark, Netherlands, Malta, Australia, Africa and beyond. The company also serves verticals such as smart metering, vehicle tracking, usage-based insurance, mHealth, point of sale, smart advertising, shopper intelligence and encrypted mobile communications.
Unique Services
JT’s services are unique due to truly global coverage (utilizing 600+ roaming agreements), open roaming and an extremely competitive price point. The company offers all the flexibility and technical agility of a sophisticated IoT integrator, with the global reach and network power of a Mobile Network Operator. JT has over 120 years’ of heritage as the incumbent operator in the Channel Islands and is owned as a strategic asset by the local Government, the States of Jersey, so the customers have the security of long-term viability. NOMAD is a unique platform for building IoT solutions based on connectivity, but extending into provisioning, monitoring and diagnosing third party applications and devices.
Clients benefit from robust support, commercial and technical flexibility, unique features for real-time connectivity diagnostics and 24/7 support.
Challenges as Advantages
JT has identified four key industry challenges and found a solution for each of them:
The first challenge is the automation of provisioning complex, multi-vendor and multi-component solutions. JT solves this with its NOMAD workflow engine and connectivity management platform.
Commercial flexibility over the life of the device is the second challenge. It’s hard for an enterprise to take the commercial risk of installing a SIM into a device that lasts 10 years, when they don’t know if their connectivity provider is going to reduce prices in line with prevailing industry norms, or even if they’re going to raise prices. JT solves this by assisting OEMs and others with deploying new SIM profiles (new network identities) over the air, when better costs for connectivity are achieved by the customer. This means JT is saying, “you don’t have to use JT for the life of the device if you can get a better deal, and we’ll help with that.”
Diversity of media, which is the third challenge, is a matrix that guides connectivity choice. The matrix consists of the value of data, cost of data, throughput requirement and module cost. Cellular, LoRa, NBIoT, RPMA, Sigfox, satellite, etc., all contend for the connectivity layer with different properties on the matrix. As IoT solution providers face this maze, it’s important if not critical they partner with organisations that are contemplating and acting on these developments in real-time; JT’s IoT team does that.
Lastly, it is critical that device identity, authentication, message encryption and data integrity are guaranteed from the point of device provisioning for the life of the device. JT’s investment in security is significant and sustained.
Keeping up with the future of the IoT sector
The future of the IoT sector is one of hybrid deployments, changing technologies and partner alliances. JT is preparing for all this by developing a connectivity-agnostic management platform that also connects different providers to a given solution. Cellular still has a bright future in IoT and JT’s global offering matches and exceeds the market leaders and will continue to do so, especially while new roaming agreements are continually added.
The company is in the last stages of developing an automated end-to-end encryption solution. This will provide managed “Cloud PKI.” Upon first activation, NOMAD will trap the IMEI of the device, dispatch a keypair to the device and to the target server, and thereby establish end–to-end closed user group encryption from the device’s first activation. This will be independent of any server infrastructure whether Amazon, IBM or in-house. It will ensure a critical component of the security stack is in place regardless of other solution components that may change over time. With JT, IoT solutions providers are not tied down in any way over the life of the device, as the company is establishing an open connectivity environment.
Website :- www.jtglobal.com