The Cellular IoT Opportunity Hiding in Your Customer Base

Time to read

4 minutes

Author

Ricky Shock, Head of Mobile Services Portfolio at Giacom

Date published

September 2026

In reality, a lot of the opportunity is much closer to home.

Businesses already rely on connected equipment and systems every day, often without thinking of them as IoT. A payment terminal that needs to stay online, a vehicle being tracked across the country or an alarm in a remote location all have the same underlying requirement: something important to the business needs a reliable connection.

There’s a sizeable commercial opportunity behind that need. The UK business mobile market is mature, currently valued at $1.4 billion, and growing at an estimated 1.3% CAGR (Analysys Mason). In comparison, the Cellular IoT market continues to expand rapidly. Industry analyst firm Transforma Insights forecasts strong growth in IoT adoption and global cellular IoT connections are expected to reach around 5 billion by 2030.

For providers looking for new areas of recurring growth, that makes IoT difficult to ignore. But the best place to start probably isn’t with the technology. It’s with the problems customers are already trying to solve.

One of our partners found exactly that opportunity with a major UK construction customer. Construction sites need to be opened and closed quickly, often in locations where installing fixed connectivity simply isn’t practical. The customer also needed to keep valuable equipment connected and reduce the disruption and cost caused when machinery failed unexpectedly.

Using Giacom Smart Mobile Data, the partner built a mobile WAN spanning more than 500 construction sites, combining reliable multi-network connectivity with tool tracking and predictive maintenance alerts. The customer has saved an estimated £50,000 to £100,000 a month in maintenance costs, while the partner has generated £1.2 million in revenue from the deployment.

What I like about that example is that it didn’t begin with someone deciding they needed an “IoT solution”. It began with familiar operational problems: sites that needed connecting quickly, equipment that needed protecting and expensive downtime that needed reducing.

That’s a useful way to think about the opportunity within an existing customer base. If something is difficult to connect, expensive to visit, vulnerable to downtime or valuable enough that the customer needs to know where it is, there may be a conversation worth having.

Once the problem is understood, the technology becomes much easier to talk about. Some applications will need multi-network connectivity because uptime matters more than sticking to one carrier. Others may need secure routing, managed hardware or only tiny amounts of data. The value comes from shaping the right service around what the customer is trying to achieve rather than simply supplying another SIM.

There’s also a migration opportunity already under way. The UK’s 3G networks have now been switched off, while the 2G sunset will follow over the coming years. For businesses with older connected devices still dependent on legacy networks, that creates a reason to review what’s out there and whether it remains fit for purpose.

But I wouldn’t make network sunset the whole conversation. The bigger opportunity is to ask what those devices are doing for the business and whether newer connectivity could do it better. Advances such as eSIM are making remotely deployed devices easier to manage, while IoT is increasingly being used for things like predictive maintenance, where equipment can flag the early signs of a problem before it becomes an expensive failure.

For MSPs and resellers that don’t already sell IoT, I appreciate that it can look like a complicated market to enter. Different devices, networks and use cases can quickly make the risk seem greater than the potential reward, particularly when time and specialist resources are limited.

That’s where we can help. Giacom’s Smart Mobile Data portfolio gives providers established ways to deliver secure, resilient cellular connectivity, including multi-network services such as FlexConnect, while our Cloud Market platform makes it easier to quote and manage IoT services across multiple customers. More importantly, our specialists can help partners spot whitespace in their customer base, understand the requirement and support them through opportunities where they need additional expertise.

You don’t need to become an expert in every IoT application to start finding opportunities. Often, you just need to understand the customer’s business well enough to recognise when something important would work better if it stayed reliably connected.

The IoT opportunity isn’t only somewhere on the horizon. There’s a good chance some of it is already sitting in the customer base.