IoT technical standard mix has been livened up with the IoT demands growing explosively, especially the most competitive LPWAN. NB-IoT, eMTC, LoRa, and even WiFi want to gain the greatest support before the large-scale deployments of LPWAN so as to occupy the leading commercial position.
A lot of telcos have supported and started deploying NB-IoT network which will largely drive the development of cecullar IoT industry - 3 billion IoT connections will be carried by the operators' networks in 2020, an eightfold increase from now.
eMTC has got support from many operators including AT&T, KPN, KDDI, NTT docomo, Orange, Telefonica, Telstra, TELUS and Verizon at MWC2017.
In addition, LoRa technical standard matured earlier due to the unlicensed spectrum it used, and grows more rapidly compared with NB-IoT and eMTC.
China Telecom has built world's broadest NB-IoT network in China; China Unicom has upgraded 310,000 base stations and carried out NB-IoT pilots in over 10 Chinese cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and is expected to have the capability of supporting 10-million level connections in 2018; China Mobile has been conducting the field test of NB-IoT and eMTC.
It is estimated By Ericson that there will be about 29 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2022, among which 18 billion will be IoT devices. The ubiquitous cellular network is suitable for carrying the inexpensive IoT connections, making city more intelligent.
Either NB-IoT or eMTC cannot meet the demands of the complex IoT application scenarios, so constructing a complex boutique network and promoting multimode terminals becomes a choice for the telcos.