Thank you for that. I will read more thoroughly.  But iIMHO the excerpt sounds a bit one-sided towards telco/itu/nb-iot/lte-m ‘ish as you elude to with your sim card reference. I guess I do a bit of delineation between wide-area RF (telco/sigfox) and near range (wifi,bt,..).  Above that phys layer there seems to be some common use of traditional internet stuff (ip, dns, tls, mqtt) but past that i still see a morass of custom protocols for the “controllers” that each use their own device identity formats.  From what I hear from trade shows like CES, I think that will not change, i.e., there will remain a common way to communicate but competing APPs each with their own identifiers (and encryption approaches).  From my admittedly simple research (I continue to buy various iot devices and then do packet traces. Picture of what I see below) I have not seen a scalability issue for the typical wifi, ble via gateway connected devices to the cloud based (many in AWS) broker+controllers.  –Rick