4.3 What are the bottlenecks preventing growth? Regulations, technology, A key challenge to globalizing connectivity Another challenge is complexity. To cultural variations and offerings is regulation. As one OEM put provide real value-added services, rich It, “The big issues we have are country data is essential According to a participant, complexity — across the licensing and certification. For every “We can start leveraging what the OEMs connectivity ecosystem, new generation of hardware, we have to have done to create scale, globalizing re-certify and re-license and that’s very and working to tap into what they have players are grappling with expensive and often very complex in done. The critical mass in this business these issues as they focus under-developed countries. So we have to for us at a global level is what we need to hire third-party people because sometimes have internally an IT architecture that we on developing models to it takes a yellow envelope to get it done. can use, plug into and play for the next globalize their offerings. There’s no real process there and it creates generation connectivity protocol.” problems because you need connectivity in And then there is tax. As globalized remote areas.” offerings increase, establishing who Of course, technology creates major is liable to tax and where is likely to challenges — from regional variations in become a complex (and expensive) issue. obsolescence to silicon lifecycles. As a A participant commented, “The issue is TSP summed up, “LTU is really getting to whether this is a telecom service or an be a mess, with 44 different bands, which information service. It’s becoming a fixed can be utilized by multiple operators. In cost for the OEMs because they’re paying the US, there are already four different for these services. They want the data, flavors of fallback. So, as a technology so the telecom service providers and cellular enabler, we’re trying to buffer the other service providers are charging that because the last thing OEMs want to them this. So these are the costs they deal with is all the separate lifecycles on are bearing themselves, and they want to silicon. They want lifetime tenure. That’s drive that cost down as well. One way to the value proposition we need to be able do that is to have it categorized as exempt to offer them.” from tax.” “It’s obviously important in the contract to identify “What about contacting customers if they’re having separation of telecom-linked charges versus data and an issue, and consider how different communication information-related charging.” methods are in China … they don’t tend to use the channel for emails the way we communicate.” “Another question, is the dealer a reseller or not? There are complications around you selling this “As soon as a state picks up on this and says this is service at point of sale if you want to do that.” a multi-million dollar industry, people are selling this information and we’re going to tax it, which is when it will really start hitting you.” The quest for telematics 4.0 | 19