'Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive' (Sir Walter Scott, 1808).

This quote from "Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field" came to my mind again when returning from my break and getting into the business activities again.

We are targeting and working in the industry to have more and more devices smarter and connected. Even though I came across the following pain points again and again in the most recent customer calls, which are making a large scale roll out challenging.

1- A main service agreement and individual contracts per each SIM: resulting in a mess to manage the SIM fleet. Imagine the administrative overhead associated to it! And even more: if you want to get out of the contract, you will need to check each and every individual contract again. An administrative nightmare from my point of view.

2- Most customers are stuck immediately with included data bundles: even that a SIM is unused, the monthly fee has to be paid. Does this really support the flexible business models nowadays, where a service is activated and deactivated? Ridiculous - it has to be a partnership between mobile network operator and the IoT service provider. Again, this is my point of view.

3- Customers need to know in advance where there devices are used in the world. And if you haven't defined a country upfront: the service doesn't work? I was pretty surprised this week, when a lead talked about this.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that this is caused by any dishonesty, which may have been induced by the quote in the title. The initial IoT contracts have been designed for a good reason. The association with a spider's web is still very obvious. Especially the first bullet point, having different end dates for contracts, is keeping customers entangled.

Nonetheless these are definitively some topics which shall not be any pain points for customers. I do hope that I had been successful in my speech to them this week. The future will tell.

And - don't be the prey being stuck in the spider's web. The action is on you to review your existing contracts and to reach out to potential new partnerships.

PS - thanks Roger Ebel making me aware of the quote above!