Our maritime connectivity team wanted to share this interesting piece by Bloomberg, which says that “The shipping industry is seeing the biggest spike in lost containers in seven years. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 have fallen overboard” - as at April 2021 with the loss calculated to be $54.5 million.

In April we announced that eSIMS are now available for Telecom26’s global roaming service. This was followed swiftly by our first big customer win with GlobalmatiX, choosing Telecom26’s eSIMs to provide mobile connectivity for its in-car fleet management systems – used by global car rental firms including Enterprise, Alamo and National.

Another week, another ransomware attack - and one that captured the attention of our maritime connectivity experts.

Two recent reports about IoT networks caught our eye from IoT World Today and the research company Omdia (created by the merger of the tier 1 analyst companies Ovum, Heavy Reading, Tractica and IHS Markit).

Our team of maritime connectivity experts have been closely tracking when cruise ships will be open for business. Of course, the industry was hard hit by COVID, however, this piece in The Economist is optimistic whilst “Only a few of the world’s 270 large cruise ships are at sea with paying passengers” operators have still been able to raise debt and equity, bookings for 2022 are at the higher end of historical demand and “Over 100 vessels are on order; none has been cancelled during the pandemic”.

Our thoughts in an earlier blog Ignore the hype about 5G private networks and focus on the global mobile connectivity your organisation really needs are still valid.

5G is the future, for sure, but LTE is here and will remain hugely significant for many years. Our advice remains the same: don’t get sidetracked by new buzzwords or FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out!). Don’t be oversold when looking for a private network solution. Make sure you really understand what LTE can do, because it’s probably what you need…