At the National IoT Technology and Application Conference 2016 held recently, Tian Wenke, general manager of customer department of China Unicom, said China Unicom will conduct large-scale NB-IoT networking field trials and business demonstration based on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands in more than 5 cities in China this year. Furthermore, China Unicom aims to push the commercial deployment of NB-IoT in major cities at the end of 2016 and early next year and push it nationwide in 2018.
NB-IoT is an important LTE enhanced technology in 3GPP R13 phase. NB-IoT standard setting has been largely completed and will be finished in June 2016.
Analysis company Machina estimated that NB-IoT will cover 25% of the M2M connections, accounting for a huge IoT market share for the operators.
Tian Wenke said that traditional cellular technology faced challenges in the application of IoT including network coverage, battery life, service quality and module costs, which NB-IoT can solve. NB-IoT benefits us with wide coverage, low power consumption, great connection and low module cost.
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China Unicom Shanghai Branch indicated before that the advantages of NB-IoT business lie in plug-and-play devices, lower device costs caused by mass production, in-depth coverage support which can realize being online anytime anywhere and efficiency of high spectrum facing the future revolution. NB-IoT technology will be used mainly in location tracking, environmental monitoring, smart parking, remote meter reading, agriculture and livestock, which mobile communication technologies can hardly support.
A complete ecosystem has been gradually established in NB-IoT by now.
Tian Wenke said China Unicom started research and business exploration of NB-IoT long time ago and has been deploying NB-IoT in Disneyland in Shanghai at present. China Unicom will continue to deploy NB-IoT with multi technologies and in different modes in Shanghai in the next five years.
It is noteworthy that China Unicom also pays attention to LoRa besides NB-IoT.