News
Companies establish over-the-air connection on live 4G network in Madrid.
Vodafone and Huawei this week completed what they claim is the first ever narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT) connection on a live mobile network, paving the way for the launch of commercial services in 2017.
The connection was established on Monday on Vodafone’s 4G network in Madrid, using 800-MHz spectrum.
"This first successful trial of NB-IoT on a live commercial network is a significant technology milestone on the path towards a world with billions of devices connected at extremely low cost with minimal power requirements to mobile networks," said Matt Beal, Vodafone’s group director of technology architecture and strategy, in a blog post on Tuesday.
NB-IoT is a low-power, wide-area (LPWA) networking standard that uses licensed spectrum to provide two-way communication over long distances and in hard-to-reach locations. It supports very large numbers of low throughput, low cost devices that consume very little power.
3GPP in June completed the standardisation of NB-IoT as part of its work on LTE Release 13.
"NB-IoT has strong support as the industrial LPWA technology to support our enterprise customers. This successful trial demonstrates Vodafone’s commitment and ability to bring this technology to market early in 2017," Beal said.
