Connectivity / Market Analysis
Wireless Logic Buys Simetry: What IoT Consolidation Really Signals
On the surface, another routine acquisition by the industry’s most acquisitive company. Underneath, a useful lens on a market that is doing something strange: consolidating hard at the top while refusing to consolidate overall, and quietly reorganising around a control point that decides who gets to be a provider and who ends up a reseller.
Analysis · 14 July 2026
The deal: Wireless Logic acquires Simetry
On 10 July 2026, Wireless Logic completed the acquisition of Simetry, a managed IoT connectivity business based in Houston, Texas. Simetry was founded in 2020 as a division of Stallion Infrastructure Services, a technology-enabled infrastructure group serving construction, energy, industrial, government and commercial markets, and it built a solid reputation for tailored, multi-carrier connectivity with unified SIM and device management, IoT hardware, provisioning services and around-the-clock US-based technical support.
It is a familiar shape of deal for Wireless Logic. Good team, sticky customers in demanding environments, deep carrier relationships, and a founder who stays on to keep building, in this case co-founder and CEO Cash Blackburn. Wireless Logic already had a North American presence through Zipit, Webbing and Blue Wireless, so Simetry is less a new market entry than a deepening of one. What matters is the tally: this is Wireless Logic’s twenty-first acquisition. Read that number again, because it is the whole story in miniature.
Closer to home: the sat365 connection
Before we zoom out, it is worth bringing this home, because the consolidation wave has already reached a corner of the market most buyers do not track. Wireless Logic is not a niche player. It is the UK’s IoT connectivity heavyweight, valued at around 3.5 billion pounds when General Atlantic joined Montagu on the shareholder register in 2025, with something north of 18 million connected devices across 165 countries and more than 750 networks.
Here is the part that lands closest to home for anyone who read our recent piece on managed LEO satellite. Among Wireless Logic’s recent purchases is Comms365, the provider behind sat365, the managed Low Earth Orbit service we looked at in detail last week. In other words, the managed satellite story and the MVNO consolidation story are the same story. Order sat365 today and you are buying a Wireless Logic company. That is not a criticism of the product, which stands on its own merits, but it is a neat illustration of how far and how quietly the roll-up has spread. The brand on the tin and the group that owns it are increasingly two different things.
The consolidation paradox
Now the strange bit. You would assume, watching Wireless Logic hoover up its twenty-first business, that the IoT connectivity market is consolidating fast. It is not. According to analyst house Transforma Insights, whose Matt Hatton has been tracking this closely, the pace of consolidation has actually slowed.
Transforma’s numbers tell the tale. Between December 2023 and June 2026, only around nine IoT MVNOs were acquired by other MVNOs, down from sixteen in the two years before that. Over the same period the number of players Transforma tracks rose from 188 to 234. Some of that growth is better coverage of the long tail rather than a genuine explosion of new firms, but the direction is clear: new entrants are arriving at roughly the same rate as others are being bought. The net effect across the market is close to zero consolidation. Wireless Logic is doing most of the heavy lifting, with three recent deals of its own in Arqia, Comms365 and Zipit Wireless, and most of the rest of the field is simply not following suit.
The paradox in one line: the most visible consolidator in the industry is more active than ever, yet the industry as a whole is barely consolidating at all. That contradiction is the interesting part, and unpicking it tells you where the real value, and the real power, is moving.
Why the market will not consolidate
It is not for lack of logic. Buying a peer MVNO makes obvious sense: more scale means a lower average cost to serve, better negotiating leverage with the mobile network operators whose data you resell, and often new geographies or added platform capability. Recurring revenue from a sticky base is exactly the kind of asset that should command aggressive bidding. So the problem is not the rationale, it is the price tag.
Venture and private-equity money has flooded into IoT connectivity and pushed valuations to levels that cash-light MVNOs cannot match. Transforma points to the multiples on display: Wireless Logic’s own valuation sits at close to ten times revenue; KORE’s take-private earlier this year was pitched at roughly 2.5 times revenue and 11.5 times EBITDA; Cubic3 reportedly changed hands at around sixteen times revenue; Telenor Connexion’s recent investment implied something in the region of six to seven times revenue. Whatever you make of those figures, they set seller expectations across the board. An MVNO without deep pockets simply cannot out-bid a private-equity roll-up at those numbers.
Two structural factors make the situation worse for would-be acquirers. First, the cost base is unusual. IoT MVNOs carry high variable costs, because they buy data wholesale from MNOs, and relatively low fixed costs. In most industries it is the heavy fixed cost that consolidation spreads across a bigger base and thereby justifies a deal. Here that lever is weak, so the efficiency case for merging is thinner than it looks. Second, with the market still growing, roughly six per cent a year in value-added connectivity revenue across Europe and North America by Transforma’s forecast, and healthier growth again in net new connections, plenty of operators reasonably conclude that organic growth is cheaper and less painful than a bruising integration at an inflated price. Spend the money on salespeople and platform, not on acquisitions.
Market data and valuation multiples in this section are drawn from Transforma Insights’ analysis by Matt Hatton, “Why isn’t the IoT MVNO market consolidating?” (July 2026). Read the original at Transforma Insights.
The other kind of consolidation
All of the above assumes the natural buyer is another IoT MVNO. Widen the lens and a different pattern appears. The deals that do happen increasingly come from players elsewhere in the value chain, precisely because they have the deeper pockets and see more value in owning more of the stack than in simply stacking up a bigger SIM base.
Mobile operators have taken the connectivity layer directly: KDDI absorbed Soracom and IIJ, SoftBank took Cubic3, NTT bought Transatel and IoT Connect Mobile. Hardware and technology vendors have reached in the other direction: Semtech acquired Sierra Wireless, G+D took Pod Group, Digi bought Particle. None of these is a wave on its own, but together they describe the real shape of the market. It is not MVNOs merging with MVNOs. It is capital, whether private equity or strategic acquirers from telecoms and hardware, buying position along the chain. The horizontal consolidation everyone predicted has stalled. A quieter vertical one is underway.
Who is best served, and the shift to value
So who actually wins from this? Follow the logic and the market is pulling apart into two groups that do well and one that gets squeezed.
At one end, the scaled platform players with genuine reach, carrier breadth and management depth. At the other, true value-added resellers and integrators who bundle connectivity into something a customer cannot easily assemble themselves: sector expertise, hardware, security, lifecycle management, application integration. The group under pressure is the one in the middle, the plain connectivity reseller whose entire proposition is a SIM and a margin. When the underlying data is a commodity, reselling it unimproved is a race to the bottom.
This is the same lesson we drew from managed satellite, where the constellation is a commodity and the managed wrap is the actual product. It now applies with full force to cellular IoT. Even large enterprises, who you might expect to buy on raw price, are increasingly gravitating towards providers that add value rather than those that shave pence off a per-megabyte rate, because the cost of connectivity is rarely the thing that sinks an IoT project. Poor management, weak security and lock-in are. The value has migrated from the bits to the platform that governs them, and that migration is about to be formalised by a standard.
SGP.32 and the new control point
Which brings us to SGP.32, the GSMA’s remote SIM provisioning standard for IoT, and the reason all of this matters more than a single acquisition ever could.
SGP.32 was sold, quite rightly, as the great de-lock-in. It separates the roles that used to be welded together: the eIM (the eSIM IoT Manager, which orchestrates profiles), the SM-DP+ (which stores and delivers them) and the IPA on the device (which executes them). In principle you can switch operator over the air, run multi-vendor strategies, and stop being trapped on one provider’s island. In principle it commoditises connectivity and hands power to the buyer.
In practice, it relocates the control point rather than removing it. Whoever runs the eIM, the single pane of glass that orchestrates every profile across your fleet, holds the keys to the deployment. And there are two catches that the marketing tends to skip.
Catch one: the configurable-eIM trap. The specification makes a configurable eIM, one that supports adding, deleting and updating other eIMs, a “shall” rather than a hard-enforced “must”. If your initial eIM is not configurable, you cannot introduce a second one, and you are locked in for the life of the device regardless of the SGP.32 badge on the box. As the industry has started to put it bluntly, lock-in at the eIM layer is the new SIM lock.
Catch two: eIMs are expensive to build. Building and certifying an eIM and SM-DP+ estate is genuinely hard and costly, a point Wireless Logic itself makes in its own glossary. So most players do not build one. They consume it as a managed service from someone who did. And as the more candid vendors admit, eIMs are typically built by the SIM technology tier such as Thales, G+D and Valid, then marketed and resold by operators, and a reseller’s eIM can quietly bind a device to that reseller’s network.
Put those two together and the market structure writes itself. A small number of scaled players own certified, configurable, genuinely multi-operator eIM and connectivity-management platforms, the real single pane of glass. Everyone else rents access and becomes, in practical terms, a reseller of that platform. Waiting in the wings, the hyperscalers, with AWS IoT Core and Azure IoT Hub already absorbing connectivity-management functions, are the obvious ultimate owners of that layer.
This is how the giants lock out the smaller resellers. Not by buying them, but by owning the layer they cannot afford to build. It also explains Wireless Logic’s acquisition spree in a market that is not consolidating: it is not merely buying customers, it is assembling the carrier breadth, certifications and platform depth to be the eIM-as-a-service backbone that smaller players depend on. Consolidation at the platform layer, fragmentation at the reseller layer. The paradox resolves.
What it means if you buy IoT connectivity
The takeaway is not doom, and it is certainly not that SGP.32 is bad, because it is a genuine step forward. The takeaway is that the freedom SGP.32 promises is conditional, and the condition is that you ask the right questions before you commit a fleet. The badge alone guarantees nothing.
- Is the eIM configurable? Can you add and remove a second eIM later? If not, you are locked in whatever the datasheet says. This is the single most important question.
- Is it genuinely multi-operator through one eIM, with per-operator policy control? A single-operator “eSIM” is a lock-in wearing a standards badge.
- What is API-accessible versus a support ticket? Day 2 operations, profile swap, suspend, decommission, audit-log export, should be self-serve. If routine changes need a human at the provider, it is not enterprise-grade.
- Separate bootstrap connectivity from long-term operator choice, so devices stay reachable while you keep the freedom to move them.
- Own the eUICC and eIM relationship where you can, or at least understand exactly who holds it on your behalf and what it would take to leave.
The irony is worth sitting with. SGP.32 gives buyers more theoretical freedom than at any point in the last decade, but only those who push hard on the eIM question will actually get it. Everyone else will find they have swapped a physical SIM lock for a platform lock, and the platform lock is harder to see and harder to escape.
The bottom line
Wireless Logic buying Simetry is routine on the surface and revealing underneath. The IoT connectivity market is not consolidating in the way everyone predicted, in headcount and logos. It is consolidating in control. The value, and the power, is migrating steadily to whoever owns the platform layer, and SGP.32 is about to make that layer the decisive one.
For buyers that is not automatically a bad thing. Scaled platforms deliver real capability that a lone reseller never could. But it does make one question the most important on the table: who owns your single pane of glass, and can you take it with you when you leave. Choose it carefully, because increasingly it chooses your networks for you. More in Connectivity.
