Some telcos are readying themselves for the IoT bonanza, but AT&T is cashing in on the connected dream today.

With 51 million ‘things’ connected to the network today, three million were added during the last period, AT&T’s Executive Director for Mobility Marketing Mobeen Khan boasts IoT is more than a commercial win for the telco, it is driving diversification.

“We have a deliberate strategy to go up the stack,” Khan stated at Mobile World Congress.

While traditionally telcos fortunes have been delivered through the network, Khan pointed to IoT as a means to diversify revenues, a long-sought desire from the industry. At the base level, AT&T can sell customers the hardware, moving up one level it can provide the connectivity, thirdly there are platform offerings, and finally, there are enterprise applications available to manage the business of IoT. AT&T is fulfilling the ambition of being more than a dumb pipe.

This is where it becomes more interesting to be involved in the IoT world. AT&T of course makes money off everything ‘thing’ which is connected to the network, but the massive potential is providing the platforms on the third layer. This is where Khan sees the IoT fortunes being delivered.

“Most companies already have the applications and software to make IoT work at a business level,” said Khan. “We don’t need to sell them these products, but we need to create the platforms which allow the data to be integrated into these applications.”

Take Salesforce as an example. Numerous companies around the world have already purchased licenses for this product, so there is little value in attempting to compete with a market leader which is a perfect foil for the business side of IoT. However, these applications are not designed to handles the vast swell of information generated through IoT. The pain point for many is filtering and actioning the useful information.

If a fridge is designed to work at 34 degrees, no-one needs to know if there are minor fluctuations each minute. If it rises to 34.2 or drops to 33.7 degrees, this is not insight. However, if the temperature spikes to 42 degrees, then you know there is a problem, this is data which can be actioned. This filtering process is the aspect of IoT which is complicated and time-consuming, not of interest to the application developers in the business, allowing AT&T to slide into the stack and provide value to the ecosystem.

Perhaps more importantly is the compounding effect. The simpler AT&T makes it for insight to be derived from data, the lower the barrier for entry for customers. Not only does this improve the potential for platform sales, but it also accelerates the number of ‘things’ connected to the network. There’s cash everywhere.

Some might be billing IoT as a justification for future 5G investments, but AT&T is getting a jump start on the market.