Sprint Unveils Curiosity Platform for IoT Management

A collaborative effort among Sprint, Ericsson, SoftBank and more has led to the unveiling of the new Curiosity IoT Platform. The news was shared by Sprint and SoftBank at Mobile World Congress Americas.

This latest news is a follow-up to a joint announcement by Sprint and Ericsson, less than two weeks ago, about building a distributed and virtualized core network dedicated specifically to IoT, in addition to an IoT operating system (OS).

At that time, the two companies addressed the core network and IoT OS. The core network is dedicated to help provide low latency and high availability, and it’s distributed and virtualized. The IoT OS features connectivity management and device management, data management, and managed services — or service assurance for all IoT elements and enterprise locations, including network-operations-center (NOC) monitoring, service-resource fulfillment, cloud orchestration management and application management.

Sprint’s Ivo Rook

“Overall, Curiosity IoT reflects our unique approach in creating the absolute best operating and management environment for IoT — from system managers enhancing their increasingly IoT-centric operations, to the most demanding applications in the immediate economy,” said Ivo Rook, senior vice president, IoT and product development at Sprint.

Here are more details about Curiosity IoT, built with SoftBank,and Packet — founded in 2014. Softbank has participated in several rounds of funding for Packet, both Series A as lead investor and Series B.

Dedicated, virtualized and distributed IoT core: reduces distance between the device generating data and the IoT application processing that data for immediate, actionable intelligence from 1,000 miles to less than 50 miles using Packet bare-metal servers.

“Sprint’s unique IoT platform design called for a distributed core to bring the network to the data, rather than the data to the network,” said Zachary Smith, CEO at Packet. “They didn’t have to look any further than within the SoftBank family, with Packet distributing the core and enabling automation in a matter of minutes, as opposed to months.”

Operating system: 

• Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA) framework provides a common secure foundation for IoT devices: a holistic set of threat models, security analysis, hardware and software specifications, along with open source firmware. Arm is a global semiconductor IP company with an ecosystem of more than 1,000 partners. The company was founded in the U.K.
• For trusted IoT intelligence, secure and structured IoT data are easily ingested from devices and integrated for analytics with other enterprise data using Arm Pelion Data Management.
• Through the Arm Pelion Connectivity Management and Arm Kigen SIM solutions, customers can securely manage and provision SIM connectivity across all devices deployed anywhere using any network protocol including cellular, satellite or LoRa, the companies said.
• Built-in security, simplified management and over-the-air firmware updates for a wide range of IoT device types deployed on premises or in the cloud through Arm Pelion Device Management.

“IoT provides a tremendous opportunity for organizations to obtain actionable insights from their devices and data, but require strong company integrations to manage the vast industry fragmentation and security challenges,” said Hima Mukkamala, senior vice president and general manager at Arm. “We are working with Sprint from device-to-data and bringing the IoT security and business-critical services that are vital for unlocking value from IoT.”

“On top of our dedicated IoT core and operating system built together with Ericsson, our close collaboration with fellow SoftBank company, Packet enables an advanced distributed core network using bare-metal servers at the edge that may be activated in minutes,” said “Arm changes the way devices are managed over the air and data is analyzed, while delivering unparalleled security from the chip to the cloud.”