Yet another industry group with designs on the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged, this time backing the narrow-band IoT (NB-IoT) standard for low power wide area (LPWA) networks.
NB-IoT lends itself well to operators since it uses small chunks of licensed spectrum to provide deep coverage of hard-to-reach places, supporting a large number of low throughput, low cost devices, consuming very little power.
NB-IoT offers similar capabilities to another emerging cellular IoT technology, LTE-M; however, according to a Nokia whitepaper published in August, NB-IoT services could use as little as 200 kHz of spectrum, compared to 1.4 MHz for LTE-M.
The NB-IoT Forum aims to drive interest in, and ultimately the adoption of, NB-IoT through proof-of-concept trials, collaborative work on interoperable solutions, and by fostering services targeted at various vertical sectors.
Its first step is the announcement of a plan to create six NB-IoT labs worldwide that will focus on a number of areas including service development, interoperability testing, and product compliance certification, among others.
The NB-IoT Forum’s founding members are China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Etisalat, the GSMA, GTI, Huawei, Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone.
"Customer pilots using pre-NB-IoT technology are already underway. Pre-commercial deployment is expected during the second half of 2016, with commercial rollout from early in 2017," said Vodafone, in a statement late last week.
NB-IoT could face competition from the long range WAN (LoRaWAN) specification for LPWA networking, which promises similar performance but uses unlicensed spectrum. It also boasts its own lobby group in the form of the LoRa Alliance.
Meanwhile, one NB-IoT Forum member, the GSMA, is busy working on its own IoT project, the Mobile IoT Initiative, which like the NB-IoT Forum is exploring the potential use of cellular spectrum to support IoT services.
