Soracom Concentrates on Connected Car Strategy

Published: October 25, 2024
  • A key aim is to support the GSMA SGP.32 eSIM remote provisioning and management standard for automobiles
  • The company’s offering would relieve automotive manufacturers of a costly and laborious process

Soracom recently announced its global strategy for the connected car industry by addressing connectivity and cloud management challenges faced in putting more connected cars on the road. To that end, it showcases a proof of concept (PoC), developed in collaboration with Toyota Motor Corporation, for a next-generation network architecture for connected cars to securely connect with their OEM cloud 

With experience supporting secure, cloud-native, global-scale cellular IoT connectivity, company officials are promoting their role in helping the connected car ecosystem manage a simple, secure, and scalable highway to the cloud.

“The connected car journey has been like a long family road trip, with the kids continually asking, ‘Are we there yet?,” said Kenta Yasukawa, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder of Soracom, in a press statement. “The good news is we are almost there—but for connected car services to succeed, the process of enabling them needs to be simple, secure, and scalable—for automakers, for dealerships, for connectivity providers, and most of all, for consumers.”

Battling Roadblocks

The connected car ecosystem has encountered roadblocks raised by the numerous backend processes and relationships automakers, dealerships, connectivity providers, and consumers must navigate to bring connected cars up to speed.

Among the challenges that have been encountered include the process of activating and managing SIM profiles on end devices; supporting flexibility in establishing and managing connectivity at the local level; ensuring end-to-end security; and efficiently integrating with connected car clouds to support the various features and infotainment content waiting to be unlocked.

These obstacles mirror those faced by the global IoT ecosystem, where Soracom’s cloud-native cellular core supports global multicarrier coverage, private fiber peering, VPNs, and integration with various cloud services without the need for software development kits (SDK).

Ready in 2025

According to company officials, a key aim of their strategy is to support the GSMA SGP.32 eSIM remote provisioning and management standard. This IoT eSIM standard, which is expected to be completed this year and available in products starting in 2025, allows more flexibility in activating connected car connectivity.

Before SGP.32, automotive manufacturers had to work with a different connectivity provider in each country where its vehicles were sold. Plus, they had to ask their primary carrier to integrate with their remote subscription management server to facilitate localization of eSIMs, requiring time-consuming negotiations and a complex backend integration process with each carrier.

“This is hard enough to do with one carrier in one country, let alone with every carrier for every vehicle model and every model year in every country,” Yasukawa said. “All the negotiations and backend integration required can take months to set up and years to manage.”

AECC Showcase

The PoC showcase with Toyota was featured at the  Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) in Berlin this week. Soracom joined the AECC in May 2024 and works alongside mobile network operators (MNOs), automobile manufacturers, communications and cloud service providers, and other related technology standards organizations and technical communities to establish new technologies and standards that advance the connected car industry.

“We are thrilled to work with Toyota Motor Company on this PoC,” said Yasukawa. “This collaboration represents a major step forward in enabling a seamless, secure, and long-lasting connectivity solution for automotive ecosystems that should help make the next generation of connected cars maintain a secure connection with their OEM cloud backend.”

Working in collaboration with Toyota, a fellow AECC member, the company is conducting phased testing. Additionally, Soracom is collaborating with AECC’s global members on advanced R&D of next-generation solutions that enable connected cars to connect to the cloud securely.

Helping Dealerships

Integrating an eSIM with SGP32 embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC) into a vehicle modem makes it work as originally expected without complex backend carrier integration. While keeping secure, private connection to their backend systems, automakers gain the flexibility to push eUICC profiles for infotainment and in-car WiFi down to vehicles with their preferred carrier already in place.

Alternatively, they can allow dealerships or connected car users to pull the carrier profile of their choice from the manufacturer’s cloud. In either case, the automotive manufacturer is relieved of a costly and laborious process.

“As a vehicle manufacturer or buyer, you should drive your own car’s connectivity, not be driven by a connectivity provider,” Yasukawa said. “With flexible SGP.32 eSIM provisioning and management, you are no longer captive to negotiating pre-market integrations with carriers that are difficult to change or update.”

The Technology

Soracom provides an eUICC profile compatible with SGP.22 and SGP.32 via API, and is ready to support SGP.32-compatible eSIMs. With the ultimate goal of empowering its automotive customers with flexibility and freedom of choice, the company can provide the SGP.32-compatible eSIM and network-side enablers so that automakers can download their own carrier profiles or set up a portal to allow dealerships or car buyers to do so.

Since 2015, Soracom has grown by providing a full infrastructure approach for connected carriers that is both secure and scalable. The company’s cloud-native, cloud-agnostic cellular core and virtual private gateway tool mean that connected vehicles won’t have to operate on the public internet when communicating with their backend systems, keeping exposure to a minimum.

And with the ability to serve IoT customers worldwide, the company can support the connected car market with a platform offering access to 417 carriers across 182 countries through virtualized cellular cores deployed in multiple AWS regions. This eases the backend complexity that automakers encounter as they negotiate with different carriers and dealerships in different countries as they set up connected car services from their clouds.

Soracom officials said they are working aggressively to get involved in the automotive sector’s new product cycles at an early stage. “Enabling connected cars is a team sport,” Yasukawa said. “Working together, we can build a simple, secure, and scalable cloud highway for connected cars.”

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