Shauli Zacks
Published on: August 26, 2025
Rony Cohen, Co-Founder of FloLIVE, brings over two decades of experience in the telecom industry to the evolving world of IoT. After building mobile operators across Africa, Israel, and Europe, he recognized a gap in the way traditional mobile networks supported IoT connectivity. In our conversation, Rony explained how that realization led to the creation of FloLIVE, a company built on global infrastructure designed to overcome challenges like compliance, latency, and fragmented coverage.
He also shared how FloLIVE is preparing for the future of IoT — from enabling seamless private-public 5G deployments to integrating satellite connectivity alongside cellular networks.
Can you tell me a little about yourself and your background?
Yes, sure. I was one of the original founders of the company, starting it back in 2016. My background is in the telecom space, and floLIVE is the third company I started.
I spent a lot of time building mobile operators from scratch in various places, some in Africa, some in Israel, some in the Channel Islands. But one thing that brought me to this point was the idea that while I worked with mobile operators and related companies at the time, I saw that we had major issues with the way IoT connectivity was handled.
The business models didn’t fit, the infrastructure didn’t fit, the roaming agreements didn’t fit — nothing worked for the IoT connectivity side of it. And at that moment I thought, this is what I need to do, and I started to work on it from 2014 and it came together.
My current role is to manage strategic accounts, and develop strategy within the company. But the most interesting work I do is in the automotive space and the satellite business that is now converging into the IoT space. That includes cellular–satellite connectivity, which can run and authenticate on our infrastructure.
What is FloLIVE’s approach to IoT connectivity and mobile infrastructure? What makes it stand out from traditional telecom providers?
A mobile operator really is based in its own country. It has spectrum for which it paid and needs to monetize it. Its focus is its own geographical territory.
FloLIVE’s infrastructure, by nature, is global. It has the largest mobile infrastructure from a core network and packet gateway point of view of any provider in the world. Today, FloLIVE maintains over 80 packet gateways and more than 40 core networks, making it the largest distributed cellular infrastructure worldwide.
Our approach is that everything authenticates on our network. We can provide a single policy from a security and routing perspective — deciding where the data goes, how it’s handled — instead of being reliant on the mobile operator’s infrastructure. That model is nearly impossible to control, especially when it comes to roaming. For example, if you take a SIM card from a large MNO and try to enforce security policies on a foreign network in Africa, Asia, or Europe, In reality, it can’t be controlled. MNOs have very limited visibility into the signaling and traffic that takes place on a foreign network.
Our infrastructure is everything. We offer a multi-network approach that is floLIVE’s true differentiator..
Today, more than 20 operator groups are part of our network. Their signaling runs on our network, and we can manage devices on their groups — MTN across Africa, Airtel in India, Vodafone in several countries, to name a few.
A SIM card may run on their antennas, but it authenticates on our core network and runs on our packet gateways. That means the data comes out of our network and our packet gateways.
This allows us to manage data, create VPNs for customers, and let them decide how they want their traffic routed — whether back to a single point or through the nearest packet gateway for low latency.
By nature, IoT is global and MNOs are local. That’s the key difference. IoT devices are built once and operate worldwide, but MNOs only cover their own countries. If you’re roaming on someone else’s network, you can’t troubleshoot or control anything.
FloLIVE, on the other hand, spans the globe. There are only one or two countries where we don’t have active devices. Our network is unified, not fragmented like traditional operators.
For example,we work with one customer that has 1.5 million electricity meters in a country. It was the mobile operator that hired us because even in its own country, it didn’t have 100 percent coverage. We provided them with their own IMSI and network on our platform, plus a secondary network for backup.
Many enterprises struggle with compliance and latency when deploying IoT devices. How do you address those pain points?
Latency is handled by our distributed network. We have far more packet gateways than any competitor — about 20 times more. We build one or two every quarter, depending on customer demand. That’s what keeps latency low.
Compliance comes alongside that. Data sovereignty rules mean data must remain in the country where it’s generated — in a car, a truck, a payment system, or a handheld device.
With FloLIVE, that data can stay in-country. It can be terminated in a local data center, server, or cloud-native infrastructure, in line with the customer’s needs.
Compliance has become the most important topic over the past couple of years.. If you can link a phone number to a driver’s name in a database, you’re already under GDPR. That data cannot leave the country.
Across industries — insurance, finance, healthcare, automotive — compliance requirements are growing. Traditional IoT and cellular setups don’t fully address this. Even we don’t cover it 100 percent but we handle it far better than anyone else in the world.
We may not have a specific network in Chile, but we’ll have one in major Latin American countries nearby. We won’t cover tiny islands where your ship docks, but we cover nearly everywhere else.
Your platform includes components like FlowNet and FlowControl. Can you explain what these are and how they work together?
FloNet is our cellular network. Enterprises or MVNOs that need SIM cards can use FloNet, which leverages our 22 operator groups worldwide and all our packet gateways and core networks.
Most of these are interconnected, so if one goes down in the US, others pick it up; if London fails, Frankfurt steps in. That redundancy is part of FloNet.
- FloControl is our core network infrastructure-as-a-service. It’s mostly used by large MVNOs and MNOs, replacing legacy systems.
- FloControl is modern, cloud-native, and ensures operators always get the latest 3GPP stack. It gives them the ability to manage devices through a unified platform — including the core network, packet gateways, and geographically distributed hosting.
We also provide a unique private 5G solution. Enterprises can set up a small core network onsite with a local antenna and run up to a million devices.
Our SIMs support up to 10 IMSIs. That means when devices leave the private site, they automatically switch to a public network IMSI, like Vodafone after a set time — one minute, 10 minutes, or an hour, depending on the customer’s preference.
This creates a seamless handover between private and public networks, while still authenticating everything on our core. When devices return to the site, they switch back to the local IMSI.
It’s one of the only true hybrid private–public solutions available.
Looking ahead, what are the biggest connectivity challenges in IoT, and how is FloLIVE preparing for them?
The biggest challenge and opportunity is satellite connectivity. We’re only at the beginning of that. The questions are: how do you manage small amounts of data, large data flows, ground operations, and sea coverage?
Our approach is to authenticate satellite devices the same way as cellular devices, on our core network. Thanks to our global infrastructure, distributed data centers, and multiple endpoints, we’re well positioned to integrate with satellite providers like Starlink and others.
It’s still early days. We have thousands of devices on satellites compared to tens of millions on cellular, but that will grow. We’re already working with satellite companies, and we believe this is the next big evolution in IoT connectivity.
