ip3labs - Featured in ArkansasBusiness.com

Ip3 Labs of Little Rock began doing business in March as a mobile virtual network operator, meaning it connects “internet of things” (IoT) devices to the internet by accessing multiple cell service carriers at the same time through embedded SIM cards.


IoT refers to the concept of connecting devices to the internet and with one another.


The company has also launched a line of IoT sensors for which it’s building an e-commerce marketplace.


“Recently, we met with a company that has 400 trailers, and they’re trying to do management on the yard. So the question is ‘If your trailers could talk, what would you want them to tell you?’ So what we do is we put in devices and then we do wireless backend connectivity to allow inanimate objects to tell us things ...,” CEO Kevin McConnell told Arkansas Business.


The company offers its eSIM multi-carrier access and IoT management platform to organizations, other
operators and service providers.


On the network operator side, “our unique, special sauce is we provide secure dynamic roaming between
three carriers (AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) simultaneously in a single profile,” McConnell said. Ip3 Labs pays the carriers for access.


But Ip3 Labs customers, he said, don’t have to choose which network their device connects to. They are charged a flat rate while their devices automatically search for and then connect to the strongest nearby cell tower.


The company also offers security via a virtual private network (VPN) connection. “We’re actually able to
provide security while we’re providing redundancy and resilience,” McConnell said.


He and his father, Robert McConnell, are the company’s only employees, but it uses 10 contractors and has sold more than 1,000 eSIM cards. It hopes to sell 10,000 by the end of the third quarter.