NB-IoT is here! The network is only two months away from being launched, but the chips and platform are ready

With the opening of emerging markets such as wearables, Internet of Vehicles, and smart meter reading, the era of the Internet of Everything is accelerating, and the connection between things has entered the fast lane of growth.

According to GSMA's forecast, by 2020, the number of connected devices worldwide will reach 27 billion, of which 10 billion will be mobile connected devices. Based on the cellular network with coverage and cost advantages, the popular NB-IoT technology will cover 25% of IoT connections in the future.

What is NB-IoT?

NB-IoT, the cellular-based Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT), is a communication technology specifically used for the Internet of Things (for example, GSM, WCDMA, and LTE are all different communication technologies).

There are many wireless communication technologies in the Internet of Things, which are mainly divided into two categories: one is short-range communication technologies such as Zigbee, WiFi, and Bluetooth; the other is LPWAN (low-power wide area network), that is, wide area network communication technology, NB-IoT is one of them.

As can be seen from the above figure, the global M2M/IoT high-speed services mainly use 3G and 4G technologies; medium-speed services mainly use GPRS technology, and although low-speed services have rich application scenarios, they lack targeted technologies.

So, NB-IoT is here! From a technical perspective, NB-IoT has four major technical advantages.

The first is wide coverage. Compared with traditional GSM, one base station can provide 10 times the coverage area and can even cover underground. The second is massive connections. The 200KHz bandwidth can provide 100,000 connections. The third is low power consumption. It can work for ten years using AA batteries without charging. The fourth is low cost. The module cost is less than US$5.

In the future, with the scale effect brought by market development and technological evolution, the power consumption and cost of NB-IoT are expected to be further reduced. At the same time, NB-IoT also has advantages that traditional cellular network technology and short-distance transmission technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cannot match: in terms of supporting big data, NB-IoT can directly upload the data collected by the connection to the cloud.

To this end, more and more manufacturers are entering the NB-IoT market. NB-IoT applications can be found in a variety of scenarios such as smart meter reading, ecological agriculture, smart parking, smart communities, and smart buildings. The deployment of NB-IoT is also increasing in the fields of municipal street lighting and garbage management, environmental monitoring, and livestock breeding irrigation.

Based on the data obtained from operators, NB-IoT can be divided into seven categories that are currently widely used or can be implemented soon:

So, with hundreds of billions of IoT connections around the world, how can we seize the IoT opportunities under NB-IoT technology?

Build NB-IoT ecosystem together and embrace the Internet of Everything!

The transition of a technology from paper to commercial use requires the support of a strong ecosystem, and the core or infrastructure of the IoT ecosystem includes the following aspects: chip (including sensors, algorithms) vendors, NB-IoT technology providers, network operators, cloud computing and cloud services, etc.

For NB-IoT, a complete industry chain including underlying chips, modules, terminals, communication equipment, platforms, operators and applications is gradually taking shape. Today, the ecosystem around NB-IoT has taken shape and is continuing to expand, and the conditions for embracing the Internet of Everything are beginning to mature.

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Among them, chips are at the core of the entire NB-IoT industry chain. Now almost all mainstream chip and module manufacturers have clear NB-IoT support plans, and Huawei, Qualcomm, HiSilicon, and MediaTek play a very important role in this. As for modules, Huawei and ZTE already have commercial modules, but all manufacturers will not be able to achieve large-scale commercial use and mass production until the fourth quarter.

At the operator level, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T and other global leading operators have released their own development plans for NB-IoT and launched pilot projects. Domestically, operators are currently piloting in first-tier cities. It is expected that by June this year, the national operator network for NB-IoT will be established, and it is planned to complete full coverage of first-tier cities by the end of this year. China Telecom will complete full network coverage of NB-IoT in the second quarter of this year.

In the terminal segment, various terminal manufacturers are gearing up. 2017 is undoubtedly the first year of NB-IoT commercialization, and the heat continues to ferment! Since low-power wide-area network communication technology is required by a large number of industries and consumer terminals, and the types of terminals are diverse, it is impossible to form a market where a few companies own large-scale terminals.

At the communication equipment supplier level, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and other major companies have launched end-to-end solutions based on NB-IoT. At the same time, NB-IoT urgently needs an open cloud platform serving the industrial chain, such as Wanwu Cloud, to break the fragmentation of data collection and processing and help achieve connections with the "hundreds of billions" in the future.

Wanwu Cloud - born from the Internet of Things and used for NB-IoT. As a free hosting platform for smart hardware big data, Wanwu Cloud can safely carry massive amounts of IoT and smart device data. By using multiple protocols, various smart devices will securely submit the generated device data to Wanwu Cloud, which will be stored and processed on the service platform, and provide reliable cross-platform data query and call services to various IoT applications through data application programming interfaces.

Among them, Wanwu Cloud provides fast and convenient hardware access services, supports mainstream IoT data communication protocols such as HTTP, MQTT, TCP, supports JSON and binary data structure formats, and high-concurrency, low-latency device data submission. Data reporting uses intermittent connections, which greatly reduces the code footprint on the device and data bandwidth and traffic.

For various data, Wanwu Cloud strictly stores them in the cloud according to the principle of data separation. It can store and query data according to the characteristics of smart sensors. Both reporting data and data access must pass security verification. At the same time, Wanwu Cloud's hierarchical cache storage mechanism facilitates high-speed query of applications and data. The platform also has built-in numerical statistics and calculation functions commonly used for numerical data, and can also preset alarm mechanisms for devices and data.

In addition, Wanwu Cloud's application programming interface and application development kit support Java and Python, and provide HTTP device data quick access interface. For specific operation applications, Wanwu Cloud provides developers with comprehensive technical support through clear and concise programming examples and interface documents, rich case sample codes, task wizards, video tutorials, online device and data debugging tools, as well as community forums, WeChat and Weibo and other social platforms.

In general, Wanwu Cloud can provide developers with practical smart hardware access services, distributed storage and processing, and application programming interface services.

Recently, Vanke Cloud officially released the device location management system to help users understand the real-time location of devices or track the trajectory of mobile devices. After logging in, users click on a certain access device and can clearly view the device's location and distribution (marked by a blue square) through Application Management-Device Management-Device Distribution. They can also further click [View Details] to view all the data of the device.

It can be said that NB-IoT has lowered the access threshold for IoT terminals, and Wanwu Cloud has helped solve the problem of data collection and processing in NB-IoT applications. While significantly reducing the technical threshold and operating costs of IoT data applications, it also meets the needs of IoT product prototype development, commercial operation and scale development at all stages. To this end, Wanwu Cloud has nearly 1,600 users and more than 5.5 billion pieces of data stored in the database.

As for the application link, NB-IoT faces thousands of diverse application demands. These IoT applications cannot form hundreds of millions of homogeneous application businesses like in the traditional communication era. Instead, they are characterized by fragmentation, and even in the same industry there are vastly different demands.

As of now, cellular networks cover more than 50% of the world's geographical area and 90% of the population, making it the most comprehensive network. Based on cellular networks, NB-IoT will combine with IoT service platforms such as Wanwu Cloud to quickly meet the connection needs of "things-to-things" interconnection, incubate new business opportunities, and become a "business blue ocean with huge potential" in the IoT era, while bringing about explosive development of the IoT industry.