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The number of IoT devices connected on cellular networks to increase by a billion over the next five years and reach 1.5 billion in 2021 – one of the forecasts revealed by Ericsson, network technology supplier to the telecommunications industry, at a recent analyst briefing attended by ARC in Singapore.
While this number may lag 2021’s predicted 8.7 billion mobile phone subscriptions, the annual growth rate of 25 percent (versus four percent for mobile phones) is highly significant for telecom operators looking to grow and diversify revenues, and for their suppliers developing technology to meet the application needs of things as well as people.
Today’s cellular networks are essentially designed for voice calls and high-bandwidth internet traffic. But watching a YouTube video on an iPhone is a very different use case for cellular than the typical IoT application, which is more likely to require lower data rates, extended range coverage to remote areas, long cellular-module battery life, as well as costs optimized for what could be a large deployment of sensors.
Ericsson, which frames its IoT capabilities in terms of Connectivity, Platforms, Analytics, and Services, is one network technology vendor making a big push to enable the Internet of Things, through core research, product releases that conform to new 3GPP (the telecommunications standards body) specifications, participation in industry consortiums, company partnerships, and a number of live trials and demos.
Here in Singapore, Ericsson is partnering with the country’s largest telecom company, Singtel, to trial Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology in the second half of this year. Singapore’s quest to become the world’s first Smart Nation, which was announced in 2014, involves, among other things, the installation of thousands of sensors to monitor everything water levels to air quality and bus occupancy.
NB-IoT is highly suited to low-end IoT applications characterized by high frequency updates, small data volumes, and involving the deployment of very large numbers of sensors over wide areas. Such applications put the onus on lower costs, longer battery life, extended wide-area coverage, and high volumes of connections. And this is exactly the promise of NB-IoT technology: cellular module cost reduction of 90 percent; 10 years plus of battery life; extended cell coverage by a factor of seven times; and more than one million of device connections per cell site.
Aside from NB-IoT, two other new low power wide area (LPWA) technologies that the mobile industry is standardizing on and that Ericsson and other vendors are supporting are EC-GSM and LTE-M. Extended Coverage GSM (EC-GSM) is designed for 2G networks, which still form the bulk of the world’s cellular infrastructure, and facilitates IoT applications through coverage improvements (of up to 20dB with respect to GPRS on the 900MHz band) and greater power efficiency. EC-GSM represents an opportunity for operators to maximize legacy 2G technology investments.
Meanwhile LTE for machine-type communication (LTE-M) builds on the mobile broadband capabilities of 4G LTE and introduces features friendly to IoT applications, such as low device cost and long battery life. LTE-M, through its variants of Cat 1, Cat 0 and Cat M, provides a wide range of bit-rates and hence caters for a much broader set of applications than NB-IoT.
Ericsson uses the term “Massive IoT” to denote applications like smart cities (parking sensors, street lighting, waste bin), smart buildings (smoke detectors, alarm systems), utilities (smart metering), and manufacturing and logistics (process monitoring, asset tracking). EC-GSM, NB-IoT and LTE-M, which all target Massive IoT applications, can be realized by software implementations to existing cellular networks.
At the other end of the spectrum is “Critical IoT” – applications which call for highly reliable and low latency networks. Not surprisingly, these necessitate much higher cellular performance. I’ll be discussing some interesting industrial applications enabled by new 5G technology developments in a follow-up blog post.
While this number may lag 2021’s predicted 8.7 billion mobile phone subscriptions, the annual growth rate of 25 percent (versus four percent for mobile phones) is highly significant for telecom operators looking to grow and diversify revenues, and for their suppliers developing technology to meet the application needs of things as well as people.
Today’s cellular networks are essentially designed for voice calls and high-bandwidth internet traffic. But watching a YouTube video on an iPhone is a very different use case for cellular than the typical IoT application, which is more likely to require lower data rates, extended range coverage to remote areas, long cellular-module battery life, as well as costs optimized for what could be a large deployment of sensors.
Ericsson, which frames its IoT capabilities in terms of Connectivity, Platforms, Analytics, and Services, is one network technology vendor making a big push to enable the Internet of Things, through core research, product releases that conform to new 3GPP (the telecommunications standards body) specifications, participation in industry consortiums, company partnerships, and a number of live trials and demos.
Here in Singapore, Ericsson is partnering with the country’s largest telecom company, Singtel, to trial Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology in the second half of this year. Singapore’s quest to become the world’s first Smart Nation, which was announced in 2014, involves, among other things, the installation of thousands of sensors to monitor everything water levels to air quality and bus occupancy.
NB-IoT is highly suited to low-end IoT applications characterized by high frequency updates, small data volumes, and involving the deployment of very large numbers of sensors over wide areas. Such applications put the onus on lower costs, longer battery life, extended wide-area coverage, and high volumes of connections. And this is exactly the promise of NB-IoT technology: cellular module cost reduction of 90 percent; 10 years plus of battery life; extended cell coverage by a factor of seven times; and more than one million of device connections per cell site.
Aside from NB-IoT, two other new low power wide area (LPWA) technologies that the mobile industry is standardizing on and that Ericsson and other vendors are supporting are EC-GSM and LTE-M. Extended Coverage GSM (EC-GSM) is designed for 2G networks, which still form the bulk of the world’s cellular infrastructure, and facilitates IoT applications through coverage improvements (of up to 20dB with respect to GPRS on the 900MHz band) and greater power efficiency. EC-GSM represents an opportunity for operators to maximize legacy 2G technology investments.
Meanwhile LTE for machine-type communication (LTE-M) builds on the mobile broadband capabilities of 4G LTE and introduces features friendly to IoT applications, such as low device cost and long battery life. LTE-M, through its variants of Cat 1, Cat 0 and Cat M, provides a wide range of bit-rates and hence caters for a much broader set of applications than NB-IoT.
Ericsson uses the term “Massive IoT” to denote applications like smart cities (parking sensors, street lighting, waste bin), smart buildings (smoke detectors, alarm systems), utilities (smart metering), and manufacturing and logistics (process monitoring, asset tracking). EC-GSM, NB-IoT and LTE-M, which all target Massive IoT applications, can be realized by software implementations to existing cellular networks.
At the other end of the spectrum is “Critical IoT” – applications which call for highly reliable and low latency networks. Not surprisingly, these necessitate much higher cellular performance. I’ll be discussing some interesting industrial applications enabled by new 5G technology developments in a follow-up blog post.