China Mobile pilots NB-IoT for smart parking, smart lighting and water quality monitoring
China Mobile is trialing NB-IoT to enable smart parking, smart lighting and water quality monitoring in several locations in China. For example, China Mobile and equipment maker Huawei are using NB-IoT to enable drivers to locate vacant spaces in parking lots in the city of Hangzhou. The operator is also working on a similar pilot with ZTE. In the pilots, NB-IoT-connected sensors monitor whether parking spaces are occupied, enabling drivers to use an app to see in real-time where they can park.
Moreover, China Mobile has teamed up with ZTE to use NB-IoT connectivity to enable the remote monitoring of water quality. In this case, the low power wide area technology is used to regularly transmit data on water quality to a public agency. For smart lighting, China Mobile is working with Huawei and Insigma Group to enable the brightness of street lamps to be remotely controlled via an NB-IoT module in the power controller.
In each case, the field trials began in February 2017, following tests in China Mobile’s labs in the second half of 2016. The limited availability of NB-IoT modules means only a small number of connections are involved in each pilot, but China Mobile has now upgraded almost 100 base stations across several cities to support NB-IoT.
The pilots are designed to help China Mobile choose the right technologies to meet the connectivity needs of various vertical industries, while building confidence in the maturity of end-to-end NB-IoT solutions. To that end, China Mobile is using the pilots to evaluate both the technical capabilities of NB-IoT and potential business models. In particular, the operator is interested in the performance of NB-IoT in terms of coverage, power consumption, the density of connections and, of course, cost. With respect to coverage, it has already established that NB-IoT can deliver the promised 20dB link budget improvement over GSM.
Next steps
China Mobile is also exploring other potential use cases for NB-IoT and its sister technology, LTE-M, including smart metering and connecting wearable devices and trackers for bicycles and consumers. Some of these applications will be the subjects of pilots, while others will be rolled out in parallel with the planned commercial deployment of NB-IoT in the second half of 2017.
At the end of March 2017, China Mobile expanded its pilots into large-scale network trials. Those trials are used to optimise the network, refine the end-to-end proposition and hone the business case for specific applications. China Mobile sees considerable demand for both smart parking, smart lighting and water quality monitoring in various parts of China.