The Global NB-IoT Summit teams up with vertical industry to keep on fast track

[Barcelona, Spain, February 21, 2016] Huawei, together with more than 300 key mobile industry heavyweights and vertical industry representatives participated in Global NB-IoT Summit held on February 21st, 2016. GSMA, top operators, key vendors and vertical industry companies shared the view of NB-IoT technology beauty and its promising business case.

2016 will be a critical year for NB-IoT, the most important cellular IoT technology being defined by 3GPP and optimized for the Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network. NB-IoT brings new benefits than we cannot address with today 2G/3G/4G. NB-IoT features low power consumption, wide coverage, low cost, and high capacity, which enable existing cellular network to offer abundant IoT applications for vertical industry.

This new technology can be applied to a wide range of use cases in various vertical industries such as smart metering, asset tracking, smart parking, smart agriculture etc. After the NB-IoT specification released in June, a lot of number of NB-IoT networks will be trialed or small scale commercially launched. It will eventually stand out against existing technologies currently used in the LPWA market.

NB-IoT represents great opportunities in Europe as well as other part of the worlds (e.g. LATAM). The full business of Internet of Things could worth 3 Trillion Euro revenue by 2020 only in Europe. It includes the complete chain and network connectivity, IoT applications, data processing and other corporate business revenues generation. NB-IoT eco-system is fast growing. However Operators and IoT communities have to team up for launching NB-IoT solutions. We need to create a momentum.

Yu Quan, Chief Strategy Officer of Wireless Product Line of Huawei, pointed out that currently only 10% of overall IoT is working on cellular networks. However cellular networks have coverage advantages and NB-IoT can provide competitive low cost LPWA solution. Huawei will be ready for commercial launch in 2016. In addition to that, some NB-IoT Open Labs under GSMA NB-IoT Forum are being built by Huawei and operators, which can bring a lot of use cases and leverage partnerships for developing NB-IoT services.

On the last panel discussion vertical companies raised their requirements to the technology. Battery life should be more than 10 years; Security of data should be guaranteed with no compromise; Time to market must be this year. They also shared a real case just happened several months ago. Unlicensed IoT solutions went off for several days due to interference with other industries. It proves the risk when using unlicensed bands.

The successful launch of Global NB-IoT Summit marks a significant milestone. It gives more confidence to NB-IoT industry to keep on a fast track.