That's not a viable process for many other kinds of consumer electronics, said Jasper CEO Jahangir Mohammed. For many devices, such as digital picture frames, camcorders or wireless dog collars, consumers will want instant connectivity as soon as they open the box, he said. In other cases, they may want to pay on a per-use basis or prepay for a certain amount of data, and a manufacturer may want to provide three months of free service after consumers buy their devices. Jasper can set up any type of plan for a certain product, he said. "We can create a new model in a matter of minutes," Mohammed said.

AT&T will be Jasper's exclusive U.S. partner for several years, the companies said. Together, the companies will work with consumer and enterprise device makers to have AT&T SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards integrated into their products, allowing AT&T to sell services to users of those devices. Buyers won't be able to choose wireless service from another carrier for the devices, Mohammed said.

Jasper, based in Sunnyvale, California, is four years old. It started out as an aggregator of network access on many carriers' networks for machine-to-machine connectivity. Providing its back-end technology to carriers is a new business, in which the company has one other named customer, European service provider Sympac.

AT&T clearly wants to enable wireless connectivity on many new kinds of devices, said analyst Kitty Weldon of Current Analysis. The partnership with Jasper could give AT&T a time-to-market advantage over its rivals, she said. Jasper particularly stands out with its technology for monitoring machine-to-machine performance.

"I'm not sure who else really has that level of visibility into what's out there and not looked at for years," Weldon said.