by Ryan Sand
In IoT deployments, enterprises’ connectivity requirements may vary greatly depending on the use case, but is it really any different for companies that need to connect their employees? Demand for enterprise mobility has been growing over the past decade. It was driven first by technological advancements, notably the steady rise of smartphones and cloud adoption, and later accelerated dramatically by COVID-19, which forced enterprises to support large-scale remote and hybrid work. The 2024 survey showed that nearly half of the workforce were mobile employees, with 20% fully mobile and another 29% hybrid.
In any enterprise mobility use case, the first question is how employees connect, and that begins with the types of devices they use. The ruggedized tablets used in manufacturing facilities or smart wearables that monitor workers’ health conditions at construction sites obviously fall into the category of IoT. But what about regular phones and laptops that are used in day-to-day operations by the mobile workforce, employees in remote or distributed teams who need to connect at the office, an airport, a client’s site or any other necessary location?
These phones, laptops, cameras and other equipment form a special pool of devices with specific connectivity requirements. Since these devices are essentially consumer, cellular connectivity is the evident choice for them, and it may seem logical to rely on regular consumer SIMs and data packages – but it’s not that simple.
Their usage patterns make them fundamentally different from ordinary consumer gadgets. First of , cloud apps, video conferencing, VPNs, and collaboration tools generate heavier and less predictable data traffic. Second, they consume large volumes of roaming data as employees travel. And third, they demand connectivity with far lower tolerance for downtime than personal consumer use.
That’s why, while technically being consumer devices, in corporate mobility use cases they are considered business-critical instruments and have many connectivity requirements similar to IoT deployments. Like IoT devices, employee endpoints must remain continuously connected in different locations, often switching seamlessly between networks. From a certain perspective, they function as human-operated IoT nodes, with similar expectations of global reach and resilient connectivity.
And just like with IoT devices, it’s important to take their requirements into consideration when choosing a connectivity solution for this type of use cases:
Data Usage Control and Device Management
The first problem is the lack of control – using consumer SIMs and contracts leaves the enterprise in the dark regarding data usage. Applications that employees work with often use background data (like updates or cloud backups), which can silently consume large amounts of data outside enterprise oversight. What happens when the data limit is reached is also beyond the company’s control. Traditional billing systems provide only delayed or aggregated reporting, which makes real-time intervention impossible. Even if there is an option to monitor usage, for the enterprises that deal with multiple contracts and carriers globally (each with different data plans and reporting tools) it creates additional operational complexity.
The second problem is the inability to manage devices in bulk. Managing hundreds or even thousands of devices individually demands substantial manpower, time, and effort. Handling large, diverse fleets of mobile endpoints in different regions and networks complicates consistent provisioning and updates, as well as policy enforcement.
Webbing addresses these challenges with a centralized portal for managing SIMs, devices, and connectivity policies, including usage alerts and profile switching. We provide full life cycle management and detailed reporting, real-time usage and security monitoring, as well as an API for native integration and a single APN for global deployment.
A good example is one of the leading global airlines which needed connectivity for various mission-critical applications such as luggage scanners, pilots and cabin crew applications and gate assistance. Webbing solutions were deployed across more than 60,000 devices, delivering coverage in every country they operate in, optimized pricing in a single invoice and a unified connectivity control center.
Roaming and Cost Control
The connectivity challenge gets further complicated if employees are constantly on the move, especially internationally. Roaming is expensive, and purchasing and swapping local SIMs in every location is a hassle. With the emergence of eSIM it became possible to use multiple profiles from various carriers, but there are still many questions around implementation details. Depending on region and carrier, data, voice, and SMS, rates vary widely. Moreover, negotiating costs for data consumption with different mobile operators in multiple countries is not an easy task.
At Webbing, we tailor our connectivity offering for every customer based on the type of connected devices and their data consumption needs as well as the locations where the devices are used. We target overall optimization of the total cost of operations for the client rather than offering “one-size-fits-all” data packages. Our solution eliminates high data roaming fees when traveling abroad, driving greater productivity while on the road.
Roaming cost optimization is relevant for virtually any business with cross-border operations. For example, one of our clients, an international consulting firm with thousands of employees worldwide, needed to eliminate the complexity of fragmented regional connectivity. Their challenges included high roaming costs in multiple regions and the burden of managing numerous carrier contracts. Webbing’s solution delivered secure and seamless connectivity all over the world, simplified provisioning and diagnostics, enabled centralized control and ensured cost transparency and expert support.
Coverage and Reliability
Ensuring consistent connectivity for the mobile workforce is a constant concern. Mobile workers may encounter dead zones in buildings or rural areas. Service quality may vary between carriers and regions. Even when coverage exists, network congestion or poor handover can cause dropped calls or application timeouts. For globally distributed teams, roaming further increases the risk of unstable connection.
Webbing’s solution overcomes these hurdles with multi-network support and always connects to the best available carrier. With our network of over 600 carriers worldwide, we have several partner mobile operators in every region. If there’s a weak spot in any mobile provider’s network, the device will simply switch to another network.
Latency
Latency is critical for enterprise mobility use cases because many business applications, such as real-time collaboration tools, VoIP, video conferencing, or remote desktop access, require near-instantaneous responsiveness.
For mobile workforce, high latency also hampers secure connectivity, since VPNs and authentication checks imply additional roundtrips that amplify delays. This may cause a wide range of problems from poor quality of video and voice communications to lag in accessing cloud resources or even application failures. These issues are magnified when users are roaming internationally.
Actual latency depends on the connectivity provider’s core network architecture, as data must travel all the way to the provider’s data center before going on to its destination. Webbing guarantees global low latency and high-performance connection at any location. We have built a distributed full core network with data centers on every continent, local breakouts, multiple network solution, and data server redundancy, that provides connectivity stability and low latency.
Scalability
Virtually non-existent in the consumer devices world, scalability becomes a major challenge in enterprise mobility. What works for a few hundred devices often breaks down at a larger scale: manual provisioning and fragmented operator contracts can quickly become unmanageable. Without a scalable approach, enterprises risk operational bottlenecks and higher support costs.
As businesses scale and deploy more devices, mobile solutions must scale with them. Webbing offers an eSIM subscription, the easiest way to provision eSIM-enabled devices and connect them to the internet worldwide.
Webbing’s Connectivity Solution for Enterprise Mobility
Webbing delivers a powerful end-to-end connectivity solution that simplifies device management, maximizes uptime and keeps your teams securely connected.
Webbing’s connectivity solutions guarantee global coverage, and through our ecosystem of over 600 mobile operators worldwide, devices can roam seamlessly across multiple carriers’ networks in every region. It solves the problem of weak spots that any mobile network may have and ensures full coverage and continuous connectivity for all units, anywhere.
Webbing is a full MVNO that has a fully redundant distributed core network infrastructure with data centers on every continent. It is well suited to support mission-critical, high-data consumption type of use cases and provides connectivity stability and low latency. It also allows for all types of localization, making it easy to comply with local regulation requirements even in heavily regulated markets.
Our eSIM solution ensures failover connectivity with the capability of using multiple mobile carrier profiles, easily changing carriers at any time, and an option to fall back from a failing profile to a different profile without any need to communicate with a remote server. Webbing also offers a portal to manage eSIMs throughout their lifecycle. It allows for defining business rules that govern the automatic profile swap process and provides visibility to profile usage and network events, to guarantee transparent connectivity. With Webbing’s solution enterprises can manage connected devices in bulk, easily scale global IoT deployments, monitor and control the data usage of each device.
Our solutions help enterprises overcome their connectivity problems and reduce time to market for global deployments, providing the benefits of roaming with multiple carrier options and seamless transition between carriers with a single SIM.
Reach out today to learn more about Webbing’s connectivity solutions for Enterprise Mobility usage scenarios.
