1NCE Platform 2.0 Showcases How Optimization for Cost Control Creates Value in the IoT

1NCE remains a relatively recent entrant in the cellular Internet of Things (IoT) Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) market, launching in 2018. 1NCE has been one of the most disruptive companies in that space, as well as one of the most successful in terms of active connected devices served. In a specialist connectivity market previously typified by large but slow-moving carriers, and small but highly technical independents, 1NCE brought a new level of simplicity and, ergo, accessibility. Simplicity does not mean simplistic, it means clear and concise, and thereby easy to understand; and crucially, to use. 1NCE is famous for its IoT Lifetime Flat plan, providing 500 Megabytes (MB) and 250 Short Message Service (SMS) messages, and lasting for 10 years. It is priced at €12 in Europe, US$14 in the United States, and ~US$15 throughout the rest of the world; with roaming connectivity in 173 countries and all development and management software included at no extra cost.

In January 2026, 1NCE announced it had 30,000 customers, and served 40 million active connected devices worldwide, collecting 4 billion data records every day. Without its Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE) business, the company managed 30 million connection directly. With a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of nearly 50% during the last 5 years, it is expected that at the end of September 2026, 1NCE was serving 35 million active IoT devices through its Lifetime offering. Longer standing IoT MVNOs have increased their customer and connections base in recent years by acquiring competitors, while 1NCE’s growth has been organic. 1NCE’s marketing and its uptake brought it attention from incumbent IoT carriers, leading to a majority ownership stake from Deutsche Telekom. All of this has been accomplished using a single iteration of the 1NCE platform—everything has stayed the same since 2018. But in response to customer feedback over time, and in an effort to the improve speed and scale of operations, it has now launched 1NCE Platform 2.0.

Platform 2.0 brings a “Big change in the Core Network,” which in the words of Sinisa Serdar, 1NCE’s Head of Solution Architecture for Europe, “will allow much better flexibility, scalability, and much faster trouble-shooting time”; alongside the promise of SGP.32 onboarding in the near future for remote Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) provisioning. The new core network allows customers 65,536 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses per subnet versus the 256 of Platform 1.0, permitting easier management of, and communication within, large networks of devices. Each Application Programming Interface (API) call made by customers to the 1NCE platform is a “transaction.” And while the default number of SIM management Transactions Per Second (TPS) is still 10, according to Serdar, Platform 2.0 permits “a huge possibility to increase TPS based on [customer] needs.” 1NCE’s Connectivity Management Platform (CMP), the Customer Portal, has also been fully redesigned to incorporate requests for new functionality.

In line with the MVNO’s mantra of ease of use, migration to Platform 2.0 will occur automatically, during October 2026 for customers in the United States, and November 2026 for the rest of the world. The core networks for Platform 1.0 and Platform 2.0 will exist in parallel for the time being, both being managed by the new 1NCE Platform 2.0 Customer Portal. All new customers and newly-ordered SIMs will connect to the Platform 2.0 core network. But by December 31, customers will need to have migrated their legacy connections out of the Platform 1.0 core network, by reconfiguring their Virtual Private Network (VPN), their 1NCE Data Streamer tool, and by adopting 1NCE’s new APIv2. 1NCE’s legacy iot.1NCE.net Access Point Name (APN) will remain the same, meaning that no customer device reconfiguration in the field is needed, but all new device connections will use 1NCE’s new sensor.net APN instead. 1NCE’s primary goal with the migration is that there will be no disruption to customers’ existing business during the migration process.

Diving a little deeper, the practical changes brought by 1NCE Platform 2.0 appear twofold. First is a slightly stricter usage enforcement, and second is improvements to 1NCE’s Data Streamer through new event data, and usage data fields. In the first case, 1NCE now enforces a mandatory 1 Megabyte per Second (Mbps) throughput limitation, which previously only applied when the carrier partners 1NCE leases capacity from insisted. Also, call session rounding is increasing from 0.1 Kilobyte (KB) to 1 KB, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) idle time is falling from 600 seconds to 350 seconds; and direct device-to-device communication over the cellular network has been deprecated, now requiring back-end routing. In the second case, 1NCE has added many new geolocation fields for location-based services, alongside new rate plan and Radio Access Type (RAT) fields. The latter is especially interesting as it teases the addition of 5G—as it is the most recently added RAT field—and, to date, 1NCE’s services have been limited to 2G, 3G, 4G, and Narrowband (NB)-IoT only.

Increasing session rounding gently increases the amount of data customers use with each call, and therefore how quickly they deplete their allowance; it encourages fewer but longer call sessions. Similarly, a reduction in TCP idle time prompts the disconnection of calls sooner, taking some strain off the host Radio Access Network (RAN), and speeding up the enforcement of session rounding. The extent to which direct device-to-device communication was used and/or valued by 1NCE’s customers is not known. But none of these changes are expected to have a detrimental impact on 1NCE’s customer experience and are in line with 1NCE’s aims of improving the performance of its platform. It is the streamlining of that platform, and the stripping down of the cost of maintaining and offering it to customers, that has been at the heart of the growth of 1NCE’s business; and less so the actual price point of its famous singular tariff plan.  

The impression held by many is that 1NCE is both cheap and aggressive in its pricing, which is how it so rapidly won its market share. By comparison, Wireless Logic launched its IoT MVNO business in 2007 and accumulated approximately 20 million connections by the start of 2026. Meanwhile, Telenor IoT launched as an MVNO in 2008 and was serving 30 million connections by the end of February 2026. In both cases, the MVNOs’ connection base was augmented in recent years by acquisition and consolidation. But as 1NCE did not serve high-bandwidth applications in its early years, most of the devices on its network send little data each month—and may never even use up their 500 MB allowance, despite the generous term length. When serving the low-bandwidth segment of the IoT, value for customers manifests in the knowledge that their devices can connect whenever they need to, even if they rarely do. This means that the returns 1NCE accrues per MB of data actually transported is much higher than its per MB pricing suggests.

In some cases, 1NCE’s IoT Lifetime Flat plan can act as a vehicle to compel initial engagement, as a jumping off point for discussions with customers that result in more valuable, custom allowances and tariffs. 1NCE certainly has a wide range of customers, from hobbyists to multi-national multi-billion dollar corporations. Nevertheless, the low-cost one-time fee of 1NCE’s core plan does present a logical, natural limit to turnover, even though top-ups are available. Profitability is acutely dependent on margin, which is itself acutely dependent on operational costs. And it is the continued optimization of the cost of providing the absolutely essential connectivity management capabilities of the Customer Portal, and the performance of the associated core network, that maximizes margin and profitability. 1NCE’s Platform 1.0 was primarily built to serve low-data IoT businesses—a limitation by design. The question now is, how this might change with its Platform 2.0.