Deutsche Telekom recently deployed the world’s first field implementation of Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT). The trial was conducted in Germany along with Huawei who provided the equipment.
The trial was developed over commercial base stations by software upgrade in order to make them NB-IoT capable. “Deutsche Telekom is an innovation leader and we are the first company in Europe, and one of the first companies worldwide, to have enhanced our commercial network to be capable to communicate with sensors”, says Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, chief technology officer, Deutsche Telekom. “We support the adoption of solutions for cellular-based IoT technology that are based on worldwide standards and not proprietary ones.”
NB-IoT is the main trend in the global cellular-based IoT technology and has a wide range of performance advantages when deployed for IoT applications that have low data rates, long battery lives and that operate unattended for long periods of time. NB-IoT allows for network deployment with only 200 KHz spectrum and a 20dB coverage gain compared to existing cellular-based solutions.
In the field trial which took place on its local network in Bonn, Germany, DT and Huawei were able to evaluate the capabilities of NB-IoT under real commercial conditions and test the usability of NB-IoT for a first application to provide a smart parking to selected users. The field trial focused on verifying the performance of the technology in a variety of challenging, actual deployment scenarios.
“NB-IoT can be deployed by software upgrade SingleRAN network, which significantly reduces network deployment costs. This mode is favorable for smart terminals sharing small amounts of data for a long time“, said David Wang, president of Huawei Wireless Network. ”Huawei supports all operators, chip manufacturers, terminal module suppliers, and device vendors, corresponding industry cooperation partners in making a concerted effort to promote rapid standardisation early 2016 and commercialisation late 2016.”
