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Industry experts to come together this week to review how Narrow Band IoT standards could open new market opportunities for high-volume machine to machine applications
Dubai, UAE - As momentum increases for more expansive Internet of Things (IoT) applications across the Middle East, Huawei and other pioneers from the telecommunications industry will be gathering in Dubai to explore how a new set of cellular access technology standards can help operators to realize exciting new applications of machine-to-machine technology. Hosted during this year's GITEX Technology Week, the discussions will take place during dedicated sessions being held on October 19.
The technology collectively known as Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) is considered a game changer when it comes to enabling more intelligent and connected cities of the future. This is because NB-IoT is unique in its ability to host a massive number of machine-to-machine (M2M) mobile connections using low-cost, low-power infrastructure. It also allows city infrastructure to be more unified and efficient by removing the need for multiple cellular networks.
"Today's M2M applications can add value to almost every industry sector in the Middle East, but the development of these applications in different industries is influenced by specific ecosystem and regulation policies," says summit panelist Bob Cai, President of LTE Product Line at Huawei. "Given its unique architecture, the advancement of Narrow Band IoT could very well be the essential step in allowing governments and enterprises to work with telecom operators to scale new business models for connected applications."
Huawei has recently predicted that by 2025 the number of connected devices installed, connected, and autonomously managed could reach as high as 100 billion worldwide.
Currently NB-IoT is being trialed by many leading operators including Vodafone and Etisalat UAE, with commercial deployments expected in 2016. It is regarded as a "clean-slate" cellular IoT technology which can address the specific requirements of bi-directional, low power and wide area applications such as smart meters, smart grids, smart parking, and more, in ways that would otherwise not be cost effective.
It does this by enabling manufacturers to access new, cheaper communications hardware that can operate for more than 10 years on a single battery and that will connect to operator's existing global network through the dedicated access layer. The technology also provides broader and deeper mobile coverage--20dB deeper than today's GSM solutions. Lower costs are further achieved through reduced complexity of chipsets and modules, slashing costs by as much as 80%. Addressing today's connection challenges in dense urban areas, the architecture of NB-IoT also allows for up to 100,000 connections per network cell.
"The economy of nearly all countries is transforming into a digital economy. Our work in developing NB-IoT solutions can ultimately help governments and businesses to improve their own services and efficiency, and is one way that Huawei is helping drive the Smart City agenda in the Middle East," concludes Cai.
NB-IoT is already a work item within the telecom industry's 3GPP RAN body and the standards are expected to be frozen by March 2016.
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Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-to-end ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages in telecom and enterprise networks, devices and cloud computing. Huawei's 170,000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world's population. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.
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