NB-IoT to turn 'smart parking' into reality

Attendees visit ZTE Corp's 5G and IoT booth on June 30, 2016 at MWC Shanghai. [Photo by Liu Zheng / chinadaily.com.cn]

Ulf Ewaldsson, senior vice president, group CTO and head of group function technology at Ericsson, said the advantages of NB-IoT was that by using the existing infrastructures such a as networks and base stations, the technology will be acceptable by most of telecommunication operators only after software updates and improvements.

He believes that the current implementation bottleneck of NB-IoT is the research and development process of chipsets that embedded in the associated terminals, and as more and more counties and regions around world are attracted by the tech, chip vendors will accelerate to meet customers' demands.

As one of the contributors to the NB-IoT Standards, another Chinese major telecommunications provider, ZTE Corporation, also offers end-to-end solutions for operators and the industry and has actively invested in the research on chips, terminals, systems and IoT platforms.

The company recently exported the technology to Romania and helped the nation establish its first smart parking lot in the west city Timisoara.

NB-IoT technology firstly drawn attention by the industry back in March last year, as Vodafone together with Huawei demoed a smart meter application that enabled by the technology at the annual Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain.

Chinese companies Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile and China Unicom, along with other world's leading telecom technology providers and operators, including Ericsson, Etisalat, the GSMA, GTI, Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm Inc, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone, joined NB-IoT Forum, have laid the foundations for a new industry forum aimed at accelerating two ecosystems around NB-IoT technology, including ecosystem in telecommunication industry and ecosystem in the cooperation of vertical market.

In the mid of June this year, 3GPP (The 3rd Generation Partnership Project) completed the global standardization of NB-IoT in a plenary meeting in Busan, South Korea.

"Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as an emerging industry with the most development potential due to the technology improved achieved in the areas such as mobile internet and big data," said Wang Xi, director of Shanghai Institute of Microsystem And Information Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Reliable business models of IoT market were not appeared until the born of NB-IoT."

Apart from the smart parking use case that we promoted as a demonstration of concept, NB-IoT has a great number of applications in the market area of Smart City, including environment, traffic, health care and public security.

"As the strategy of 'Made in China 2025' being further initiated and given the development space that provided by the replacement from export chipsets to domestic-made products, the integrated circuit sector will welcome a hundred-billion-yuan-level business opportunity, especially in the fields such as NB-IoT and 5G," said Xu Tianshen, senior vice president of global markets of Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Technology research company Gartner Group said it expected 6.4 billion connected devices to be in use next year, up 30 percent from this year, with the number reaching 20.8 billion by 2020.

According to the company, IoT services spending will grow 22 percent to $235 billion in 2016.

CCID think tank, an consulting institution direct affiliate to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of China's IoT market scale increased 30.5 percent from 195.8 billion yuan to 567.9 billion yuan in four years from 2010 to 2014.

The organization also expected that the global CAGR of IoT will witness 61 percent growth in five years and become the largest market for IT equipments and services.