Enterprise IoT Connectivity Survey 2026 - The Connected Fleet Report Highlights

More than 80% of enterprise IoT buyers, across every industry surveyed, say at least one capability of their current connectivity provider falls short. That finding sits at the centre of The Connected Fleet 2026, a new research report from Pelion produced with ABI Research, based on a survey of 675 cellular IoT decision-makers across the UK, US, Canada and Europe, plus ten in-depth interviews with enterprise IoT leaders at companies including Autoliv, Drax, Enbridge, Honeywell and UPS.

The picture that emerges isn't one of connectivity simply getting harder; it's one of connectivity outgrowing the operating model built around it. Fleets are going international faster than contracts can follow. Expertise gaps are blocking projects that budget alone never could. Security incidents are landing on the P&L instead of staying confined to the design phase. What follows are the report's six headline findings, told through eight of its key statistics, with the analysis behind each one. For the full survey data, the interview material and Pelion's own recommendations for the next two procurement cycles, get the complete report.

1. The estate is going international

International share of the average cellular IoT fleet is on track to nearly double by 2030, climbing from 29% today to 49%, and the trajectory doesn't level off with time: it rises by seven points in the first year alone, another six in the second, and keeps climbing after that (Q6, full survey base n=675).

The shift is broad-based rather than concentrated in a handful of outliers. UK Energy respondents already report over a third of their fleet operating internationally and expect to cross the halfway mark before 2030; US Manufacturing respondents expect to move from below a third international today to just under half. A connectivity model designed for a fleet that was 70% domestic tends to assume one carrier relationship, one billing cycle and one regulatory regime, and each of those assumptions becomes load-bearing in ways the original procurement decision never anticipated. IoT roaming agreements that were a footnote at the outset become the dominant cost line within five years, and an escalation path built for a single account team starts to fray once the device is sitting in another country.

Key takeaway: The connectivity model that fits this year's fleet probably won't fit the fleet running in 2030, and the gap only gets more expensive to close the longer it's left.

2. Coverage isn't the constraint anymore. Operating beyond it is.

Sixty-five percent of respondents cite managing deployments outside the core coverage area as their single biggest scaling pain, well ahead of the 41% who cite coverage limitations themselves (Q22, full survey base n=675). That 24-point gap is the real story. Most enterprises have already worked out how to commission a SIM where their main estate sits; what they struggle with is the long tail, new regions, rural pockets, cross-border sites, and the locations at the end of a fibre run that the cell tower itself depends on.

Three of the ten interviewees raised Scotland, independently of one another, as a coverage problem zone, each for a different use case. Drax's IoT lead summed up why switching mobile network operators rarely solves a rural gap:

"If cellular coverage is bad in an area, another carrier does not necessarily have better coverage. The bigger issue is whether you have someone close enough to put feet on the ground when something fails." — Drax, IoT lead

Key takeaway: Validate coverage before the contract is signed, not after, and judge a provider on how they behave at the edge of coverage rather than on the coverage map alone.

3. The CMP sprawl problem

Forty-seven percent of respondents flag using multiple Connectivity Management Platforms, the operational dashboards used to activate, suspend, monitor and bill SIMs, as a genuine scaling problem (Q22, n=675). The trigger is usually the fix for the problem above: as fleets add a regional carrier for every new market, CMPs multiply in lockstep, and a connectivity operations team ends up reconciling billing across three or four different logins, catching anomalies a beat slower than it should because the data lives in separate systems.

Honeywell's Building Management Systems are designed to last fifteen years; the cellular routers inside them run on a far shorter cycle and go live whenever the building they serve does, sometimes months or years apart. That mismatch creates its own kind of sprawl, as a senior product manager at the company explained:

"Even though all the cellular connectivity is on a single bill, the contract with cellular operator for a single router will fall on a different date due to when the router was installed. Managing the staggered contract end-dates means knowing when to renew contracts for sometimes hundreds of routers." — Senior Product Manager, Honeywell

Key takeaway: "One dashboard" is a claim worth probing rather than assuming. Fifty-eight percent of respondents open to switching provider cite better connectivity management functionality as the reason, but among manufacturing respondents already dissatisfied with their platform, 38% were on an MVNO and looking to move again.

4. Why "lack of expertise" tops the block list

Sixty percent name a lack of expertise, internal or external, as the single biggest reason cellular IoT projects stall, ahead of budget constraints at 49% and connectivity issues themselves at 43% (Q14, n=675). That ordering is worth sitting with. An industry that has spent a decade making the radio layer cheaper, faster and more standardised has quietly moved its bottleneck up the stack, to the point where a buyer can order a SIM in seconds but cannot buy the advisory help they need in anything close to the same timeframe.

The gap tends to split into two failure modes. The first is advisory: a buyer wants help choosing the right network technology, SIM strategy or roaming model, and the provider has nobody available to give it; limited or poor advisory services is, in fact, the most-cited specific complaint among respondents dissatisfied with their provider's IoT expertise. The second is responsiveness, where the buyer needs help mid-deployment and support is slow to engage.

Key takeaway: Treat advisory bandwidth as a procurement criterion in its own right. Ask what specific pre-deployment activities, coverage validation, device certification testing, network technology recommendations against the use case, are written into the contract itself, not offered as an afterthought once the SIMs have shipped.

5. Security has crossed the operational threshold

Just under one in four respondents, 24.6%, experienced an IoT security incident in the past twelve months (Q26, n=675). Two years ago that would have mostly been a design-phase question; today it shows up on the budget line.

The financial detail explains why. Among respondents who had an incident, 30% say it cost more than $100,000 in lost revenue, 8% say it cost more than $1 million, and 16% took longer than a month to resolve once detected (Q27a/c, n=166).

Eighty-two percent of respondents rate security as critical or important when choosing an IoT connectivity solution, so the gap here isn't awareness, it's that awareness and incident rate haven't yet converged. Enbridge's IIoT lead described one specific mechanism behind that gap: malicious profile switching, an attack category that becomes possible precisely because eSIM enables remote profile management.

"SIM identity theft is a growing issue as device fleets scale. Attackers steal the SIM, take the IMSI and clone the SIM profile. You lose a lot of telemetry data." — Enbridge, IIoT lead

Key takeaway: The boundaries between device security, network security and regulatory evidence have effectively dissolved. Look for IoT security built into the connectivity layer itself, private APNs, monitored profile changes, audit trails, rather than sold as a separate integration project.

6. The MVNO question

Seventy-seven percent of respondents not currently using an MVNO would consider one for their next deployment, against a current installed base where just 23% name an MVNO as their primary provider today. That's a gap of roughly 54 percentage points, the single largest signal in the dataset (Q15, n=675; Q17, n=520).

The reasons behind the openness are practical rather than ideological: cost and commercial flexibility lead at 66%, followed by better connectivity management functionality at 58% and broader multi-network IoT SIM access at 48%. The reasons for hesitation are just as revealing. Sixty-one percent cite reliability and network concerns, and 50% cite limited global coverage, both really judgements about the underlying network rather than the MVNO model itself, since an MVNO's network is, by definition, an MNO's.

Key takeaway: The more useful question isn't MNO versus MVNO, but whether a provider owns enough of the stack, SIM lifecycle management, a single CMP, deterministic roaming, security architecture, advisory bandwidth, to actually solve the buyer's problem.

Pelion's view

None of this is news to us. Pelion's CEO, Dave Weidner, describes the pattern behind it in the report's own foreword: connectivity looks like the easy part of IoT, right up until an estate crosses a border, scales in volume, or ages into its second or third generation of devices. "Connectivity is the easy part of IoT, until it isn't," as he puts it. We've watched that moment play out across our own customer base for years, and it's exactly why Pelion exists. Pelion doesn't just want to make IoT connectivity easy, safe and reliable; the mission is to make it extremely easy, safe and reliable, effortless enough that it fades into the background so you can get on with running your business.

Here's how that plays out in practice:

• Ready to scale from day one. A multi-network IoT SIM, physical or digital, connects across 600+ networks in 150+ countries on a single SIM and a single APN, built to support the latest standards from the outset. When a device crosses a border or a fleet outgrows its home network, there's no procurement cycle to restart and no new hardware to ship.

• One pane of glass, not four. The Pelion Portal replaces the fragmentation of managing multiple CMPs with a single view: order, monitor, troubleshoot and bill an entire SIM fleet from one login, with the visibility and control that scaling actually demands. SIMs are provisioned and updated over the air, so growing the fleet doesn't mean growing the truck-roll bill.

• Expertise that learns your business. Pelion puts real people alongside your team: advisers with 25+ years of deployment expertise who take the time to understand your specific use case, rather than reciting generic IoT knowledge back at you. No two deployments are the same, which is exactly why that guidance pays off: fewer costly mistakes, less operational downtime, and a plan that fits how your business actually runs.

• Security built in, not bolted on. Weak controls at the connectivity layer are an expensive place to find that out, and the numbers in this report show exactly how expensive. Pelion closes that gap with VPNs, dual IPsec, eUICC profile governance, and security alerts and automations that keep a growing attack surface in view rather than out of sight.

• Managed connectivity that doesn't ask you to choose. Pelion already operates the multi-network, single-CMP model that 77% of respondents not currently using an MVNO say they'd now consider, backed by flexible, pooled data plans and 99.995% uptime. Moving to that model doesn't mean trading reliability for flexibility; with Pelion, you get both.

Pelion was ranked #1 for IoT Connectivity Management on G2 in Summer 2026, voted there by the businesses running connected operations that can't afford to fail. That's the same idea behind our strapline: Global IoT Connectivity Made Effortless. Effortless isn't a tagline we picked because it sounded good; it's what happens when someone else has already solved the pains behind the six findings above, so you don't have to.

Get the full report

The six findings above are a fraction of what's in The Connected Fleet 2026. The complete report includes the full survey breakdown by industry and geography, the interview material behind every finding in this piece, a dedicated look at where eSIM adoption is genuinely ahead versus overstated, and six procurement questions worth putting to any connectivity provider before the next contract is signed.

For more Pelion research, visit the reports and guides hub.