Low Cost Connectivity Spreads Across China

Yun Hu explains why China Unicom is aggressively rolling out new Mobile IoT technologies

Yun Hu, explains why China Unicom is aggressively rolling out new Mobile IoT technologies

China leads the world in the deployment of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), one of the specialised mobile technologies that are ushering in a new era for the Internet of Things. Mobile operator China Unicom is at the forefront of the push to harness the low power wide area coverage provided by NB-IoT both to enable new applications and to improve the cost effectiveness of existing services.

In response to fast-growing demand for the technology, Unicom already offers NB-IoT coverage in 20 cities across China, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Fuzhou. Moreover, the operator estimates it is now supporting between 20,000 and 30,000 NB-IoT connections. “By the end of year, there will be 20 million NB-IoT connections across the whole of the Chinese market and by 2020, there will be more than 600 million,” says Yun Hu, Director of IoT Technology and Development Centre at China Unicom’s Network Technology Research Institute, noting that China’s public sector is particularly keen to employ NB-IoT to make it cities smarter and more efficient. “The government is a big supporter of NB-IoT both for vertical services and for Internet projects in big cities,” she says.

Having piloted the technology for smart parking, water metering and smart lighting applications, Unicom is now signing commercial agreements with both municipalities and private companies to employ NB-IoT in a wide range of scenarios, including remote monitoring as well as remote control of equipment. “We have more than 50 use cases,” Dr. Hu says. “For example, we have an industrial factory in China, which is using NB-IoT to connect machines working on the production lines.” In Shanghai alone, Unicom has upgraded more than 2,000 base stations to support NB-IoT. Shanghai Unicom’s early NB-IoT customers include building managers who are now using the low cost technology to connect more than 1,000 smoke detectors.

Delivering customised low cost connectivity

Although many of the use cases are only feasible with an optimized connectivity, such as NB-IoT, some customers are using the technology to upgrade an existing solution. In the case of smart metering applications, NB-IoT is primarily replacing GSM connectivity, says Dr. Hu. In other scenarios, the low power wider area connectivity is being used in place of WiFi. “We are deploying NB-IoT on demand first, as and when customers ask for it,” Dr. Hu explains. “It is just a software upgrade.” But the ultimate aim is to blanket China with NB-IoT coverage. Dr. Hu says that Unicom is building a new nationwide core network, which should be completed by the end of the summer.

In some cases, Unicom is providing customers with full end-to-end NB-IoT solutions, while in others, it is simply providing the connectivity. Dr. Hu says that water and energy utilities, such as SoftGrid, tend to only require connectivity, while government departments are also using Unicom’s related cloud services and data analytics to implement smart city solutions. Dr. Hu says Unicom prices NB-IoT services according to the frequency of connections, rather than the volume of data its customers use.

Unicom is also working with some consumer device makers, including leading smartphone player Xiaomi, to add NB-IoT connectivity to wearable devices and other gadgets, such as pet trackers. Dr. Hu says that there are already 20 different NB-IoT modules available in China supporting various frequency bands. Unicom is using a mixture of 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum to support the technology, depending on whether it has been able to refarm specific bands to support 4G.

Building a broad and diverse ecosystem

Unicom recognises that the vibrancy of the NB-IoT market will depend in part on the availability of a diverse range of devices, platforms, applications, chipsets, modules and other compatible components. “The success of NB-IoT cannot be separated from the support of the ecosystem,” Dr. Hu notes. “The Unicom Group will deploy an IoT platform to our customers, which we will open through APIs. We also provide a NB-IoT open lab, so customers and partners can develop innovative IoT applications.”

China Unicom also plans to use LTE-M – another Mobile IoT technology – to provide low power wide area connectivity for customers. “We are already doing a LTE-M pilot in Beijing and we already have some use cases,” says Dr. Hu. “We are doing testing of modules, for multi-mode NB-IoT and LTE-M, which will be used in different scenarios.” In 2017, Unicom plans to mainly focus on NB-IoT, while trialling LTE-M, before rolling out the latter technology commercially in 2018. Dr. Hu believes that both technologies will play a major role with NB-IoT well-suited to connecting static sensors, actuators and monitors, and LTE-M well-suited to supporting mobile applications. China Unicom regards connected vehicles as a very important market, particularly as demand grows for services that enable consumers to summon a ride as and when they need it.

Unicom regards the IoT as an important future growth engine for its business. Speaking at Mobile World Congress Shanghai in June 2017, Shen Hongbo, General Manager of Shanghai Unicom, said: “We’re seeing a bottleneck in [subscriber] growth in Shanghai, and we don’t see a lot more income being generated from traffic. More revenue will be generated from IoT, converged businesses as well as content-related operations. We will have to rely on IoT to grow our business.” He estimated the low power segment of China’s IoT will account for three billion connections while the high-speed segment will be less than 200 million connections.

Indeed, China Unicom is anticipating that the IoT will ultimately have an enormous impact on the mobile industry. “The IoT will bring operators billions of connections,” adds Dr. Hu. “I think this is the first thing. The second thing is that operators can extend their services into the platforms and applications side by cooperating with vendors.”