In K–12 education, teachers, administrators, and support staff are stretched thin, and resources are often limited. Administrative processes like time and attendance tracking can take valuable time and budget away from helping students succeed.
Founded in 2015, Pennsylvania-based Touchpoint K12 set out to support school district IT and HR teams with advanced people management systems. Today, Touchpoint’s solutions are deployed across the United States, providing simple, reliable, and affordable time tracking for everyone from teachers and administrators to maintenance and support staff.
Touchpoint’s contactless time clocks, self-operating kiosks, and plug-and-play DIY kits simplify accurate timekeeping, reduce the administrative burden, and help schools meet compliance requirements with state-level guidelines.
“Our device is always working, with staff clocking in and out 24/7,” says Seth Hartman, Director of Operations and Facilities at Touchpoint K12. “When school staff use it, they know it’s going to work.”
Touchpoint K12 offers a flexible mix of connected hardware options so districts can tailor solutions to their unique needs. Schools can choose from four fully connected product lines, each designed for a specific use case and backed by ongoing support:
Hartman and his team design each device for a seven-to-ten-year service life, sourcing components that deliver both reliability and value. LTE connectivity is built in as a backup for locations where Wi-Fi is unavailable or blocked by district IT policy—ensuring devices remain operational no matter the environment.
Previously, Touchpoint K12 relied on one of the “big three” U.S. carriers, but high per-line costs and limited backend management tools made scaling difficult.
“We paid so much for the SIM and then had to pay more for the data,” says Hartman. “It just wasn’t designed for a business like ours, with so many separate customers using individual lines in the field.”
Switching to Soracom brought not just cost savings, but also powerful IoT-focused management tools. Using the Soracom User Console, the Touchpoint team can monitor usage, manage lines, pull detailed reports, and even lock SIMs to specific devices for added security with IMEI Lock – a key advantage in school environments where devices may be tampered with.
More recently, Touchpoint K12 has adopted the Soracom Onyx LTE dongle to bring simple, plug-and-play cellular connectivity to its time tracking devices.
Touchpoint’s commitment to quality has earned the trust of IT teams and school administrators across the country, creating a feedback loop that fuels ongoing product improvements.
“Our ideas come directly from requests that schools share with us,” Hartman explains. “There’s one IT specialist for every 1,000 staff members. It’s very hard for them to manage everything the kids and teachers need. We think of ourselves as an outsourced IT department.”
Looking ahead, Touchpoint is working on new capabilities to support emergency evacuations, assess staff exposure to illnesses, and create solutions that help students directly—all while maintaining the reliability and security that customers depend on.
Founded as the national Sigfox operator for Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, HELIOT Group delivers reliable low-power, wide-area (LPWA) connectivity through a distributed network of over 800 base stations. Their infrastructure is designed to support the rapidly growing demand for IoT applications, where small sensors and devices need to communicate efficiently and at scale.
Sigfox connectivity offers a unique balance of extremely low energy consumption, long transmission range, and low cost. Devices can transmit small data packets across distances of up to 10km in cities and up to 50km in rural regions. This makes Sigfox an ideal choice for use cases like asset tracking, smart building monitoring, and environmental sensing, applications that don’t require high bandwidth but benefit from wide-area coverage and years-long device battery life.
Heliot’s mission is to make IoT accessible and sustainable. By providing a strong backbone for Sigfox-based solutions, they help innovators, enterprises, and municipalities bring projects to life, whether it’s monitoring air quality in urban areas, tracking assets across borders, or supporting smart agriculture in rural communities.
Sigfox already connects more than 10 million devices across 65 countries, proving its value as a global IoT standard. But for a regional operator like HELIOT, ensuring service quality at scale presents unique challenges.
One of the most significant issues is Europe’s fragmented telecom market. Many IoT projects require multi-national coverage, yet establishing individual agreements with separate carriers in each country adds unnecessary complexity and cost. For customers, this can translate into deployment delays, administrative hurdles, and uncertainty around reliability.
Heliot also recognized the risk of relying solely on a single type of connectivity. A network outage, even a short one, could disrupt mission-critical applications, lead to lost data, and in some cases raise safety or compliance concerns. The challenge was clear: design a network with world-class reliability while keeping service affordable and straightforward for customers.
Heliot engineered its Sigfox network to include multiple connectivity options at every base station. By supporting several wireless operators simultaneously, the network creates a built-in failover system that ensures service continuity. If one carrier experiences downtime, traffic can automatically switch to another, maintaining seamless coverage for end users.
This approach not only reduces the risk of service interruptions but also strengthens Heliot’s ability to meet demanding service-level expectations. Customers deploying IoT devices for asset tracking, security monitoring, or industrial control can rely on consistent, resilient connectivity without having to manage multiple operator agreements themselves.
To make this possible, Heliot needed a back-end cellular connectivity solution capable of delivering secure, reliable coverage across all three countries they serve. That solution also needed to integrate cost-effectively into their existing service model, which prioritizes efficiency and scalability.
Heliot’s extensive experience working with wireless providers made the advantages of Soracom immediately clear. Soracom’s global, multi-carrier coverage gave HELIOT a simple way to unify connectivity across Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, reducing administrative overhead while enhancing resilience.
Rapid deployment was another critical factor. Soracom’s console and APIs allow Heliot to provision devices instantly, monitor connections in real time, and manage hundreds of SIMs with full transparency and control. For a growing network already spanning more than 225 base stations, these capabilities are essential to delivering best-in-class service.
Perhaps most importantly, Soracom’s pay-as-you-go model aligns perfectly with HELIOT’s business case. Since cellular is used primarily as a failover resource in their architecture, costs are incurred only when needed, eliminating waste while preserving reliability. Together, these advantages make Soracom a trusted partner in building Europe’s most reliable Sigfox network.
Over the next two years, HELIOT Group plans to expand Sigfox availability to cover 85% of the population across Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. This expansion will extend the benefits of affordable, low-power IoT connectivity to more industries, communities, and citizens across the region.
At the same time, Heliot is looking outward. With global demand for Sigfox IoT solutions continuing to rise, the company is exploring opportunities to extend its model into new markets. By combining Sigfox’s proven low-power capabilities with Soracom’s global cellular integration, HELIOT aims to deliver scalable IoT connectivity solutions across borders.
Ultimately, Helio’s vision is to provide the foundation for a smarter, more connected world – helping innovators bring IoT projects to life with reliability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency at scale.
For many schools and universities, adopting connected teaching tools is an appealing way to modernize education. Uchida Yoko’s Internet 100 Boxes, which house IoT sensors and cameras to measure factors like temperature and humidity, offered a way to bring real-time data directly into the classroom as part of the curriculum.
However, deploying these systems at scale came with challenges. Many facilities were concerned about the cost of laying out dedicated network infrastructure, particularly in outdoor or remote areas where wiring would be impractical or costly. At the same time, manually tracking thousands of devices to ensure proper operation would be inefficient and expensive.
These barriers threatened to slow the adoption of a system that could otherwise transform teaching and provide students with a direct connection to real-world data.
To overcome these challenges, Uchida Yoko turned to cellular IoT connectivity. By equipping each Internet 100 Box with Soracom Air SIMs, the company could bypass the need for costly new infrastructure while ensuring reliable data transmission from sensors and cameras across a wide geographic range.
The cellular approach also gave schools flexibility: whether installed in a remote outdoor location or an urban campus, the devices could connect immediately without additional setup. This made scaling the solution far simpler and reduced the burden on school IT teams.
Equally important, Soracom’s pay-as-you-go pricing structure ensured that the project would remain affordable as it grew, keeping long-term operational costs under control while supporting thousands of deployed sensors.
Soracom’s platform provided Uchida Yoko with the ability to fine-tune connectivity to match their needs. Since most sensor data is lightweight, Soracom’s adjustable data speeds helped minimize costs without sacrificing performance.
In addition, the Soracom User Console allowed Uchida Yoko to remotely monitor the communication status of each sensor and camera. If an issue arose, they could quickly determine whether it was caused by the hardware, the network, or the device itself. This ability to isolate and address problems remotely reduced downtime and kept classrooms running smoothly.
By combining flexible connectivity with strong management tools, Soracom gave Uchida Yoko confidence in scaling their IoT-powered teaching materials nationwide.
Looking ahead, Uchida Yoko plans to expand its investment in IoT-powered education. By leveraging real-time data, they aim to give students richer, hands-on learning experiences that connect theory with practice.
Their vision is to transform classrooms into dynamic environments where environmental conditions, IoT technology, and interactive lessons combine to create a more engaging way of learning. With Soracom as a partner, Uchida Yoko is well positioned to lead this shift toward smarter, data-driven education.