Telefónica builds ecosystems around LTE-M and NB-IoT
Telefónica is running four NB-IoT pilots and two LTE-M pilots to support the development of a vibrant ecosystem around these Mobile IoT technologies and accelerate their commercial deployment. In Spain, the operator is piloting the use of LTE-M to transmit data from digital energy meters developed by Itron and to monitor when refuse bins need to be emptied. Both pilots employ Ericsson’s network equipment, Sierra Wireless’s modules and Altair’s chipsets.
Telefónica Spain is also using NB-IoT to connect CO2 meters made by Flex, Telnet’s digital shields, which can detect movement, bottle meters made by Flex/Butano24, which monitor when a container needs to be refilled, car park sensors made by Worldsensing and tracking devices developed by Abeeway/Flex. For these pilots, the operator is employing network equipment from Ericsson, modules from Telit and chipsets from Intel. Several of the pilots also employ the Geeny.io data management platform.
Telefónica is running multiple small-scale pilots simultaneously to test the potential of Mobile IoT technologies in different scenarios in both the consumer and industrial markets. As well as underlining industry support for Mobile IoT technologies, the pilots are designed to evaluate their performance vis-à-vis non-standardised alternatives employing unlicensed spectrum.
The multinational operator envisages that these low power wide area technologies will simplify the provision of connectivity for many IoT applications, while also cutting costs. As a result, Telefónica will be able to offer a larger portfolio of IoT solutions, as LTE-M opens up new personal and industrial use cases for connectivity, while NB-IoT can be employed to connect meters, monitors, sensors and other devices that don’t need to transmit large amounts of data.
The pilots are helping Telefónica to optimise the business processes required to enable it to work with partners to take a Mobile IoT concept all the way through to commercialisation. The operator is seeing strong demand for Mobile IoT solutions: Across its markets in Latin America, Germany, Spain and the UK, Telefónica is evaluating three or four new prospects every week.
Results from the pilots
In just nine months, Telefónica has developed a value chain and an ecosystem encompassing six devices and two open labs, where the operator works with partners to develop new applications. The pilots have helped Telefónica identify interoperability issues between the modules and the radio access network and the radio access network and the core network. It anticipates that these issues will be resolved by the end of 2017 in time for a broad commercial rollout of NB-IoT and LTE-M.
Telefónica is also working with its partners to bring about improvements in several features of the new technologies, including power saving mode (PSM), extended idle-mode discontinuous reception (EDRX) and extended coverage. These improvements should be completed in the second or third quarters of 2017. Although Telefónica plans to sign several flagship Mobile IoT deals with customers during 2017, broad commercial launches are likely to wait until 2018 and the timing will vary market by market.