Launching the next product line: ATEC scales smarter minus the SIM card

About ATEC

ATEC is one of the technology leaders in the clean cooking space. The company operates across three disciplines at once, hardware, software, and data, covering the range of a device developer, a project developer, and a service provider in parallel.

ATEC’s core product is a single-hub induction cook stove connected to the internet, generating usage and device metrics for a specific purpose: carbon credits. The business sits under a social enterprise model, so the revenue generated from those credits flows back to the households that create them. That’s why ATEC also builds the middle layer of its stack: a mobile app where end users monitor their consumption and receive micro-payments.

ATEC is active in many countries, starting with Nepal, Bangladesh, and many others and Malawi being a recent new market that prompted a new product line. This new market was a large project the company launched in 2025 and the same project is on a deployment rollout in several more markets ATEC is now entering.

Requirements for the next product line

Designing a new product line for these markets meant solving three problems:

1. Appliance integration

ATEC made a deliberate call to place its metering hardware inside the stove itself and combine it with the stove’s control board. Every induction cook stove usually ships with a default control board but ATEC replaced it with its own design, integrated into the rest of the appliance.

This requirement introduces real hardware constraints: limited space for components, the ability to mitigate grid instabilities that exist in the new markets, and additional protection that don’t exist on the stove by default.

2. IoT connectivity that holds its ground in every market

Reliable, cost-efficient connectivity across markets with inconsistent network coverage.

3. dMRV requirements

dMRV stands for digital Measurement, Reporting, and Verification and it’s use of digital tools to track and validate the environmental outcome of an action without a physical visit or paper records. ATEC needed this in its new product line to be able to return the payments of the credits to the users rapidly.

To support these, ATEC also required a small backup battery circuit, so it could run over-the-air updates reliably and close sessions based on user behavior, even through power interruptions.

Enter: SIMCom, the hardware solution

As a technology leader, ATEC has the expertise to customize their product with engineering resources. Hence, good documentation and a solid developer kit were important differentiators for selecting a module. SIMCom stood out, also in this respect.

“We had access to good documentation and a good dev kit, so we generally felt we understood the technology well enough at the start of the project. Direct communication with SIMCom was really helpful, because it also meant access to R&D. Our engineers talked with SIMCom’s engineers to discuss the development.”

SIMCom also understood the network realities of ATEC’s deployment markets. LTE Cat 1 and Cat 1bis are the simplest form of full LTE. It is a sixteen year-old a technology, but nonetheless, still the most dominant standard for IoT because of how widely it’s rolled out. Most countries have standard LTE coverage today, even as some regions in Africa and South America are still catching up.

That’s the case ATEC was designing for, which is why SIMCom built the A7682, pin-compatible with the 2G modem ATEC’s previous product used, alongside the slightly larger A7672 on the same chipset. Both are among the last SIMCom platforms to keep 2G fallback, and both remain popular for exactly that reason. The module runs slightly bigger than a standard 2G modem, but SIMCom kept it as pin-compatible as possible, since many companies want to swap out an old 2G modem to test LTE without redesigning their board.

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From plastic to provisioning: How ATEC scaled the next deployment

Before: Physical SIM card slot

The markets ATEC deploys in are often seen as challenging for stable connectivity. The 2G setup is often the default in these markets and what ATEC’s previous product version worked with. But for the new line, ATEC wanted 4G with 2G fallback.

“Where possible, we wanted to use multi-access, which Onomondo does really well, and from a cost management perspective, it’s important for us to have carrier management.”

That combination of multi-access and carrier management also supported the design decision to move to live transmission of usage data instead of a scheduled collection. ATEC wanted a global IoT provider to manage deployments it couldn’t otherwise handle across markets. eSIM wasn’t a workable option at the time as it required pre-installing roaming profiles that weren’t widely available at the time – add to that the cost of the embedded chip itself. So ATEC started with a physical SIM.

“We’d completed our conversations with Onomondo and started onboarding on some projects, and that changed the way we were able to deal with data, and also access to it through the marketplace option and the wholesale data costs, which was very attractive for us from that perspective.” 

After: SoftSIM

Cost reduction was already on ATEC’s roadmap, and one of the first ideas was testing a low-memory version of the module. That’s where softSIM entered the conversation. Onomondo SoftSIM in combination with low memory ticked every box in ATEC’s list. That’s where the R&D collaboration between ATEC, SIMCom, and Onomondo began.

For ATEC, the case for softSIM rested on three things.

1. Cost: the plastic of a physical SIM is redundant once the SIM application be installed on the module directly. 
2. Security: a physical SIM can be removed and reused in a smartphone, which is a real risk for ATEC. 
3. Reliability: physical SIMs are often vulnerable to vibration, another reason to design them out where possible.

“The idea is really to simplify all the steps involved in getting a SIM card into a device – to remove all the steps that include shipping, the physical use of extra materials, plastic, and other precious materials that go into creating the SIM card.” 

– Giulia Manzini, Partnerships Manager, Onomondo

SIMCom can use the module’s own microprocessor to execute the functions a SIM card. It was first developed on the A7672 platform, which has enough memory to make that fairly straightforward. The challenge appeared when the requirements for lower memory and costs came up.

This challenge was approached by ATEC, SIMCom, and Onomondo with tight collaboration and pragmatic coordination. With a direct line to ATEC, SIMCom’s tech and sales teams worked alongside Onomondo to integrate the SoftSIM into the new low-memory module. The rest is history all three can be proud of.

Results and benefits

The shift has changed several things about how ATEC operates, across a deployment of around 65,000 devices and growing.

• Simpler provisioning 

Removing physical SIM logistics has real operational value. As ATEC mentioned, previous batches of physical SIMs were delayed because shipments were stuck in transit.

• Visibility and control

Understanding where traffic is routing and having the ability to influence that post-deployment matters more –and has significant savings– at the scale of 65,000 devices ATEC operates.

• Cost reduction

The move to a low-memory module combined with softSIM is estimated at a 6–10% cost reduction, plus a lower bill of materials from removing components like the SIM card holder.

• Setup proved to work

ATEC found no simulated field failures tied to the new setup. The device size hasn’t changed, but the internal footprint has and it has freed up space inside an already space-constrained device.