We are pleased to announce that we have improved the OTA (over-the-air) update behavior for delivering Subscription Containers to compatible Soracom IoT SIMs.

Subscription Containers are a feature available on certain Soracom IoT SIMs which allows you to add extra subscription plans to the same SIM for additional coverage and redundancy. When adding a subscription container to a SIM, the additional subscription plan is delivered using an OTA update.

In some cases such as a weak signal or loss of connection, the OTA update process may be interrupted. Until now, restarting the OTA update has required waiting for at least 25 hours, moving the device to a new location to resolve connection issues, and manually deleting a device's cellular session or rebooting the device to re-trigger the OTA update, with a maximum of 3 retries before giving up.

With this update, we have improved the retry mechanism so that OTA updates are automatically restarted as quickly as 5 minutes once Soracom detects that connection issues have been resolved. The maximum number of retries has also been extended to 12 retries. Together, these improvements will help to reduce both the number of errors in delivering Subscription Containers to SIMs and the time needed to complete an OTA update.

Effective Date

This update will be automatically applied for all customers on August 14, 2024.

Please note the improved delivery mechanism will only apply to Subscription Containers that are added on or after this date. Subscription Containers that are added prior to this date will still be delivered using the previous OTA update mechanism.