New industry forum for non-broadband IoT underway
China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Etisalat, the GSMA, GTI, Huawei ,Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone have held a preparatory event, chaired by Vodafone, to lay the foundations for a new industry forum aimed at accelerating the ecosystem around Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology.
The NB-IoT forum will bring together all of the industry and ecosystem partners in a way which helps deliver NB-IoT to the market as quickly as possible. The forum will be hosted within an existing industry level organisation, yet to be confirmed.
NB-IoT is the emerging industry solution for deployment of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks using licensed operator spectrum, in-band, guard band and stand-alone deployments, and is expected to have global scale. The new technology is designed to provide deep coverage of hard to reach places, supporting a massive number of low throughput, ultra-low cost devices, with low device power consumption and optimized network architecture.
The NB-IoT forum aims to:
- facilitate demonstrations and proof of concept trials which strengthen the NB-IoT solution to meet LPWA requirements;
- lead partners to build a strong end-to-end industry chain for NB-IoT future growth and development;
- drive and proliferate NB-IoT applications in vertical markets for new business opportunities;
- promote collaboration between all NB-IoT industry partners to ensure interoperability of solutions.
China Mobile, Etisalat, LG Uplus, Shanghai Unicom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone have also announced their support for the creation of six new NB-IoT open labs worldwide, which will focus on NB-IoT new service innovation, industry development, interoperability tests and product compliance certification.
It is expected that these labs and others will form a key part of the NB-IoT forum initiative. New use cases and business models will be explored in these open labs, and results will be shared with the whole industry.
Customer pilots using pre-NB-IoT technology are already underway. Pre-commercial deployment is expected during the second half of 2016, with commercial roll-out from early in 2017. The NB-IoT forum and the open labs will help to drive the development of the NB-IoT industry to the next stage.
The detailed scope, format and objectives of the forum will now be worked on, with membership extended to further companies in future.