Pessl Instruments, the Austrian company whose METOS weather stations sit in orchards, vineyards and grain fields around the world, has handed the connectivity for its network to 1NCE, the German-American IoT connectivity company known for selling a SIM with ten years of data for a single payment. The two companies said in late July that the arrangement connects thousands of stations and field sensors in more than 80 countries and has kept the service available 99.97% of the time, a figure that comes from the companies themselves.
Those stations feed FieldClimate, Pessl's online platform, which turns readings on rain, soil moisture, temperature and leaf wetness into forecasts and warnings about frost, extreme weather and crop disease. Farmers use that picture to decide when to irrigate, spray or fertilise, so a station that goes quiet on the wrong night can cost a harvest.
Gottfried Pessl, who founded the company in Weiz, Austria, in 1984 and still runs it, said farmers need "a clear picture of their fields," which means his stations "have to work everywhere, all the time." Nicolas Martinez-Fresno, 1NCE's chief sales and marketing officer, described farming as "one of the most demanding environments in IoT, remote, global, and unforgiving when data stops flowing."
Why A Weather Station Maker Needs One SIM For 80 Countries
That demand for coverage everywhere explains the choice, because Pessl sells the same hardware into dozens of markets and cannot negotiate a separate mobile contract for each one. Its current station, the modular METOS 5, logs data every 15 minutes, uploads it to FieldClimate every hour and runs from a solar panel about 13.5 cm square, using LTE-M or NB-IoT as its main links, the two low-power cellular technologies that mobile operators run for devices sending small amounts of data.
The station can also fall back to 2G or 4G, or connect through LoRaWAN, Wi-Fi and satellite where the mobile network runs out, and it stores readings offline until a connection returns. A single roaming SIM that works on local networks in more than 170 countries lets Pessl ship one product and switch it on wherever a farmer installs it.
What One Payment Buys
1NCE built its business on exactly that kind of customer, and its standard IoT plan costs US$14 as a one-off payment and covers 500 MB of data and 250 text messages over ten years across 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE-M and NB-IoT, with no monthly fee, and customers can top up or extend it when they run out.
Spread over a decade, 500 MB works out to a little over 4 MB a month, which suits a device that sends a few kilobytes of weather readings every hour but would not suit one streaming images. Neither company has said whether Pessl uses the standard plan or a custom deal, so the arithmetic shows why the model fits farm sensors rather than what Pessl actually pays.
A Bigger Farm Push Than The Deal Suggests
For 1NCE, the partnership adds a well-known name to a segment it already serves heavily. On its CES 2026 page, the company says it connects more than 40 million devices for 30,000 customers, and that more than 1,600 of those customers, about 7% of the total, work in farming uses such as pest control, crop monitoring, smart irrigation and beehive monitoring.
The company raised US$60 million in April 2025 from backers including Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank, and it now runs from Cologne and Miami under co-chief executives Ivo Rook and Alexander Sator. Rook called the US its largest and fastest-growing market at the time, and 1NCE has since built out software around the SIM, including 1NCE OS for managing devices remotely and an Energy Saver tool for stretching battery life.
Pessl's Own Expansion Plans
Pessl has its own reasons to want connectivity that scales without fuss. In March 2026 it set up a South African subsidiary and announced plans for 100,000 METOS stations across Africa, which it describes as the continent's largest agricultural weather network, building on more than 200 stations already running in the Western Cape.
The company plans to finance that network privately and to lower the entry cost for farmers by offering the hardware free for the first six months, then charging a subscription for the digital services. A plan built on hardware that farmers do not buy upfront only works if the connectivity bill stays predictable for years, which is exactly what a prepaid decade of data offers.
Why Farm Weather Data Is Worth Connecting
Local weather data carries real money in farming, and the gaps are widest where Pessl now wants to grow. The World Meteorological Organization says that Africa's density of surface weather stations remains far below global standards, and it estimates that closing gaps in observations could cut forecast errors by 30% in Africa and unlock around US$5 billion a year in direct benefits worldwide.
Farm stations like Pessl's do not replace the national networks that the WMO has in mind, since they serve individual growers and follow commercial rather than meteorological standards. They do, however, give a farmer the one reading a national forecast cannot, which is what happened in that farmer's own field last night.
The Limits Of A Global Roaming SIM
A single SIM that roams everywhere still has to follow each country's rules, and some countries restrict permanent roaming, where a foreign SIM lives on a local network indefinitely. Brazil, Turkey and Nigeria ban the practice outright, while China, India and several Gulf states limit large deployments, according to a 2023 overview by roaming carrier BICS.
Operators usually work around those rules with SIMs that can load a local operator's profile over the air, and 1NCE lists this switching ability as part of its standard plan. How smoothly that works in restricted farming markets such as Brazil is something Pessl's customers there will learn in practice, since the announcement does not name the countries it covers.
Network age brings a second limit, because the METOS 5 still uses 2G as a fallback while operators across Europe and elsewhere are switching off 2G and 3G, as our look at the UK switch-off showed, so stations that lean on older networks in remote valleys will need LTE-M, NB-IoT or satellite coverage to take their place.
Satellite is already part of that answer, and the METOS 5 lists satellite links, known as NTN, among its options. We have looked at how satellite-backed LoRaWAN is reaching deeper into farming, and a station maker that can mix cellular, LoRaWAN and satellite in one box has more ways to keep a farm online than any single network can offer.
The SIM Becomes The Station Maker's Problem
The deal matters less for the 1NCE logo than for what it says about how farm IoT gets bought now: a grower buys a weather service, and the SIM, the network and the roaming contract become the station maker's problem to solve once, for every market at the same time.
For growers comparing station makers, the useful questions follow from that, including which networks a station falls back to when LTE-M is missing, how long it stores data offline, and whether the service plan covers connectivity for the life of the hardware. Pessl's answers look strong on paper, and its African rollout, which aims to put up to 100,000 stations on farms that have never had one, will show whether a prepaid decade of data holds up in the places where the mobile network is thinnest.
