China Unicom pilots NB-IoT for smart parking, water metering and smart lighting
In 2015, Shanghai Unicom, a subsidiary of China Unicom, teamed up with Shanghai Disneyland to pilot a pre-standard version of NB-IoT. Using a Huawei chipset and software, and an u-blox module, the pilot began with a single NB-IoT base station. After the technology had been evaluated and verified on that base station, Unicom deployed NB-IoT on tens of base stations to support smart parking and water metering applications simultaneously. The pilots are designed to help the development of end-to-end applications, supported by an appropriate industry value chain.
By January 2017, Unicom had upgraded 600 base stations in the Shanghai area to support NB-IoT. Moreover, its “preliminary commercial” NB-IoT network is connecting sensors monitoring about 400 parking spaces in the Disneyland theme park.
China Unicom is also running a smart lighting NB-IoT pilot in the city of Weifang, Shandong province, together with Advanced Optronic Devices Company. The pilot commenced with two base stations serving two connected street lamps, but China Unicom plans to expand it to encompass 24 base stations serving 40,000 connected street lamps.
Key learnings
China Unicom is evaluating NB-IoT against key performance indicators related to coverage, capacity and device cost. The pilots have demonstrated that the coverage of NB-IoT is much better than that of a LTE or UMTS network, especially in some indoor scenarios, such as underground car parks.
Unicom also believes NB-IoT can provide “huge capacity” at “low cost”. In the pilot, NB-IoT delivered an air interface delay of about 1 second using the 900MHz band with the single-tone work pattern and 15kHz uplink subcarrier spacing, while throughput was 15.6kbps in the uplink and 33.6kbps in the downlink.
Next steps
Looking to harness NB-IoT’s coverage and low power characteristics to enable services that enhance the experience of visitors to the park, Shanghai Unicom and Shanghai Disneyland are also exploring some other potential use cases, such as environment monitoring and smart queuing.
More broadly, Unicom is now deploying large-scale NB-IoT commercial networks in several pilot cities using the 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands. The networks will support vehicle diagnostics, water and gas metering. In 2017, Unicom intends to construct thousands of commercial NB-IoT networks in more than 100 cities. The operator is also encouraging potential customers, chipset vendors and network equipment vendors to support NB-IoT in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands.