> 99% of these sorts of problems can be eliminated by being up-front with your system requirements and expectations from your customer At my last job, and also

> 99% of these sorts of problems can be eliminated by being up-front with your system requirements and expectations from your customer At my last job, and also every IoT company I've worked at, we've implemented an HTTP endpoint that just returned the current time in milliseconds. Why would we do this? Well, it turns out, many corporate networks just block NTP all together and refuse to open up egress on NTP because "UDP is insecure and we only allow HTTPS" > We are in a position to fire our customers if they are not willing to work with us on critical technical constraints like this. You should not punish your technical team because your customer is unable to satisfy their part of the bargain, unless there is some special fee or other compensatory measure in the contract. I would have loved to have this freedom but unfortunately smaller startups, that are just getting established, don't always have this ability. In the end this was solved in a few different ways. One of my favorite is to just get a 4G modem in your device and an IoT data plan from any telecom. You can also pay a little more to get the ISP to NAT you to a VPN you can talk to all of your devices directly. I've never used this provider but you get an idea of the market: https://www.oliviawireless.com/ipsec-vpn-for-iot https://www.oliviawireless.com/ipsec-vpn-for-iot