UScellular has chosen Nokia WING to drive the ConnectHQ platform that aims to help its business and government customers manage large scale IoT deployments.
ConnectHQ combines the carrier’s IoT offerings and network with Nokia’s global IoT ecosystem. It provides users with a dashboard that facilitates self-managed of a variety of functions. The system will allow customers to:
- Manage day-to-day IoT activations and suspensions
- Monitor data usage on every device in real time
- Set up usage alerts and create easily shareable customized reports
- Track usage trends that can be adjusted to control costs
- Create automated triggers when certain conditions are met
- Secure remote devices to prevent fraudulent misuse
ConnectHQ aims to put the customer in charge. “The Nokia WING solution gives businesses the power and control to manage their wireless devices to best meet their needs, and we look forward to implementing additional capabilities in the future to further streamline vast IoT deployments for our customers,” Kimberly Green-Kerr, UScellular’s senior vice president of enterprise sales and operations said in a press release about the Nokia UScellular IoT offering.
The emergence of the IoT has presented carriers a new business opportunity, with most larger carriers creating business units to exploit it. The arrival of 5G adds even more promise and capability given its capacity and ability to connect massive amounts of devices and sensors.
This challenge of managing thousands, or even millions of devices and sensors is what applications like ConnectHQ seems designed to meet – securely managing these massive amounts of endpoints.
During its earnings call earlier this month, new UScellular CEO Laurent Therivel alluded to the company’s interest in connected agriculture as a key IoT use case.
The use of the IoT to do such things as monitor crops for more efficient watering and tracking livestock and equipment is often seen as a likely early beneficiary of IoT-based networks. Last year, for instance, Rural Telecommunications of America and Internet of Things America partnered on a plan to help farmers leverage the IoT.
