From capability to consistency: how the UK channel scales cellular IoT revenue

A conversation with Andy Smethurst, Channel Director at Pangea

Cellular connectivity is already a familiar part of many partner portfolios across the UK channel. It appears across backup, rapid deployment, primary business connectivity, and IoT devices.

What hasn’t always followed automatically is consistency. Not because the opportunity isn’t there — IoT remains a high-growth market — but because turning that growth into predictable revenue brings commercial, operational and support responsibility that partners are understandably cautious about absorbing without clear structure.

For Andy Smethurst, Channel Director at Pangea, that tension is a sign of a market moving into a more mature phase.

“The problem isn’t demand,” he says. “It’s the challenge of industrialising how cellular is sold — moving from one-off successes to a sales motion that pricing, delivery, and support teams can rely on as volumes grow.”

Andy brings more than two decades of channel experience to the role, having spent over 20 years at Gamma helping to scale indirect revenue as the business grew from a small provider into a FTSE-listed organisation. That background shapes how he approaches cellular today — not as a new category, but as one where the mechanics of scale increasingly determine outcomes.

From selling connectivity to supporting estates

One distinction Andy returns to is the difference between transactional connectivity sales and estate-level services.

“Most of the channel can sell cellular,” he says. “But customers aren’t buying SIMs in isolation. They’re deploying connected estates.”

That difference isn’t semantic. Estate-level deployments introduce lifecycle management, resilience expectations, visibility requirements, and operational dependency. Those factors shape how services need to be priced, supported and forecast as they grow.

“Once you move beyond single deployments, managing SIMs manually just doesn’t scale. Having a proper IoT Portal — and the ability to consolidate estates into one view — becomes foundational, not optional.”

And estate-level connectivity doesn’t always start as a strategic decision. Services that were introduced tactically can start behaving as infrastructure, emerging as reliance accumulates faster than intent.

What begins as pre-ethernet connectivity often remains live and later becomes relied on as backup. Backup links begin carrying regular traffic during business hours. IoT pilots move from proof-of-concept into operational dependency as estates scale.

Those transitions are predictable — but they only scale cleanly when they’re anticipated commercially, not discovered retrospectively.

“When connectivity becomes recurring, distributed and operationally critical, it’s commercially real — even if it didn’t start that way,” Andy explains.

Recognising those signals early allows partners to structure deals more deliberately, aligning commercial models with how services are likely to be used over time rather than how they were initially introduced.

When add-ons stop behaving like add-ons

Treating cellular as an add-on is often the right decision early on. It allows partners to move quickly, test demand and solve immediate customer problems without over- engineering services — for example, adding temporary connectivity to get a site live while fixed-line delivery completes, or bolting on backup for a single critical location.

The challenge emerges when those exceptions become normal.

“A lot of cellular sales are still situational. They come up when there’s a specific problem to solve, a deadline to hit, or a fixed-line issue to work around. That’s fine early on, but it doesn’t automatically create a repeatable revenue line.

In commercial terms, add-on behaviour typically means cellular is quoted separately, justified case by case, and treated as something outside the core service rather than part of it. Even as reliance grows, it continues to sit on the edge of the proposition.

“When a product stays reactive, it fails to become strategic,” Andy says. “It becomes opportunistic revenue rather than planned growth — and that’s where scale starts to strain.”

Over time, that exception-based model makes it harder to forecast confidently, standardise delivery, or scale estates without introducing friction elsewhere.

By contrast, when cellular is treated as part of infrastructure — as hygiene rather than contingency in fixed-line delivery for example — it’s designed in from the outset. Pricing assumptions are consistent, operational responsibility is clear, and the service is structured around how it will actually be relied on over time, not just how it’s introduced.

“For many partners, the hardest part is knowing where to start. Clear, packaged entry points — whether that’s pre-ethernet, failover, primary 5G, or bundled solutions like body-worn video or home monitoring — make it much easier to build confidence and momentum.”

Capability proves possibility. Maturity enables scale.

A distinction Andy makes repeatedly is between proving capability and demonstrating maturity.

“One-off deals prove capability,” he says. “But scalable models prove maturity.”

In practice, the difference often shows up later — when pricing assumptions diverge across sites, delivery models don’t stretch cleanly, or support effort grows unevenly as estates expand.

“Big deals often show what’s possible,” Andy adds. “They don’t always show what’s repeatable.”

For Andy, the role of cellular suppliers is to support repeatability — sales motions that can be run again with confidence, where pricing, delivery and support behave predictably as reliance increases.

What Pangea is deliberately building — and why

This is where Andy sees Pangea’s focus sitting.

Rather than pushing partners to sell more cellular, the business is deliberately designing the conditions that make cellular easier to sell well at scale — commercially and operationally.

“What’s really impressed me is the breadth of technical capability already in the Pangea’s portfolio. That depth matters because scaling cellular isn’t about one use case — it’s about supporting very different environments without having to reinvent the model each time.”

That means clarity in how cellular is positioned, packaged and priced. Defined support and delivery models that don’t become heavier as estates grow. And tooling and processes that allow partners to move from first deployment to repeatable motion without re-deciding fundamentals on every deal.

Scaling that kind of consistency isn’t only a sales or delivery challenge — it also depends on whether partners are supported with the right context at the right moment as conversations move from early interest to concrete customer use cases.

“Good marketing in this space isn’t about promotion. It’s about helping partners have better conversations at the right moment — whether that’s early discovery or showing where cellular fits naturally within an existing customer base.”

“You can’t will repeatable revenue into existence,” Andy says. “It doesn’t happen just because sales teams are motivated or the market is growing. It’s fuelled by product simplicity, pricing clarity, a defined support model, and when provisioning and billing just work — quickly and reliably.”

“For many partners, the hardest part is knowing where to start. Clear, packaged entry points — whether that’s pre-ethernet, failover, primary 5G, or bundled solutions like body-worn video or home monitoring — make it much easier to build confidence and momentum.”

The objective isn’t to remove complexity from customer environments, but to prevent unnecessary complexity from accumulating in the commercial model as volume increases.

“Complexity kills scale,” Andy adds.

Individually, bespoke pricing or delivery decisions often make sense. Collectively, they slow momentum.

Structure enables scale. Relationships sustain it.

For all the emphasis on structure, Andy is clear that mechanics alone don’t scale a channel.

“In the UK channel, the human side matters more than I realised early on in my career,” he says. “The channel scales when partners feel part of something — when you build a community around shared growth, celebrate wins, and make it enjoyable to do business together.”

For him, the balance is clear.

“Structure creates the foundations. Simplicity allows things to scale. And relationships create the loyalty that compounds.”

Andy is also clear that success shouldn’t be measured by announcements or initiatives, but by how selling cellular feels day-to-day for partners.

“If by working with us, cellular in a partner’s portfolio feels more structured than situational, and more predictable than opportunistic, then we’ll be doing our job well.”