Japanese operator KDDI and telecoms equipment and service provider Ericsson, have announced the successful joint verification of cellular Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies. The verification includes Cat-M1 and narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technologies.
Ericsson’s LTE base stations, including those in KDDI’s network, can support cellular LPWA through Ericsson’s new software product, Massive IoT RAN. This gives KDDI the possibility to deploy a comprehensive range of IoT applications quickly and flexibly.
The two companies will continue to study possible use cases enabled by LPWA technologies. LPWA networks are designed for IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that have low data rates, long battery lives, are low cost, operate in remote and hard to reach locations. LPWA technologies are well suited for deployment across a number of different verticals such as utilities, agriculture, manufacturing, wearables and transport.
The announcement follows the 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP) decision to standardise three Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) technologies in licensed spectrum. Ericsson and KDDI verified cellular LPWA technologies are based on 3GPP standards. Ericsson’s network equipment supports both Cat-M1 and NB-IoT.
The growth of LPWA in China
These developments took place against the backdrop of Mobile World Congress Shanghai, which featured a wide range of live LPWA demonstrations in the agricultural, industrial, home and smart city sectors. For the second year running, industry experts explored the potential of LPWA at the event’s ‘IoT Summit’, which saw significantly more attendees over the year before.
According to the GSMA’s CTO Alex Sinclair Alex Sinclair, “The GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative is working with China’s mobile network operators to deliver commercial LPWA solutions in licensed spectrum to accelerate adoption and transform the development of the Internet of Things in areas such as agriculture, automotive and utilities.”
China’s machine-to-machine (M2M) market will reach one billion connections by 2020, with the majority coming from the developing Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) market, according to a recent report by GSMA Intelligence and The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).