NB-IOT Forum is Preparing to Take Off

[Hong Kong, Nov. 6, 2015] Top telecom industry members China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Etisalat, the GSMA, GTI, Huawei ,Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm Incorporated, Telecom Italia, Telefonica 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 organization.

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 also announce 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.