DIGITAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS: CELLULAR IOT
NB-IOT
OCTOBER, 2021
– what has
gone wrong,
and when will it
go right?
(ARE WE THERE
YET... ON THE
ROAD TO
MASSIVE
IOT?)
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
Cellular IoT
deployments
GSMA GSA
NB-IoT
106
120
LTE-M
53
55
Both
52
54
FOREWORD
M
Annual IoT
shipments
(millions)
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
2021
2023
2025
Legacy M2M
– 2G / 3G
3GPP LPWA –
NB-IoT / LTE-M
Broadband IoT
– 4G / 5G
Non-3GPP
LPWA
Source: Berg Insight
2
assive IoT? What a joke. Of all
the over-hyped tech trends,
was there ever one like IoT? Ericsson and Cisco said a decade
ago, lest we forget, that this market would
reach 50 billion connected devices by 2020
– by last year. The Swedish vendor’s latest review says there were about a quarter of that
number (12.4 billion; see box, page 3) in circulation at the end of 2020, and there will be
about half (26.4 billion) in five years, by 2026.
Which does not sound that bad, actually –
into double-digit billions, at least, after a decade of technical trial-and-error, plus financial
recession, geopolitical crisis, and global pandemic (see pages 16-18). Except that the contribution from the cellular market, putting
most of the pressure on the crank-arm of the
hype machine, is a fraction of that total – 1.7
billion in 2020 (a little over a seventh), rising
to 5.8 billion in 2026 (a little under a third).
Yes, the telecoms industry’s share and
contribution is growing; but its success so
far – and even its advances in the mid-term
– hardly justifies all the big talk. And what
these numbers tell us, actually, is that massive IoT will be a short-range IoT market for a
long while, yet – with Bluetooth, Zigbee, and
various other low(ish)-power IEEE 802.15.4
technologies seeing the lion’s share (78-85
percent) of the action in the period.
Nordic Semiconductor is a short-range
specialist, which has moved in recent years
into the cellular game; Svein-Egil Nielsen,
its chief technology officer, remarks: “I’ve
never seen any other industry like telecoms
– I mean, it was talking about 5G five years
before it had anything. And the hype around
5G has been so intense it probably undermined cellular IoT rollout. But we all thought
IoT would come earlier. There is no question
about that. All the projections are probably
two or three years delayed. We have all been
asking, when is it going to take off?”
Only two or three years? More than that,
surely? But the thing about this joke of
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
massive IoT is no one is laughing, because no
one has given up on it. Because everyone is
still too busy trying to make it work. For the
cellular industry, that means getting NB-IoT
(and, to a lesser extent, LTE-M) to fly, at last
– by finally untangling the mess around integration, interoperability, roaming, and billing
that have made it the punchline in the comedy. Cellular IoT networks exist in most markets (see map, page 2) – 159, says the GSMA;
175, says the GSA. The former says cellular IoT
will reach 3.2 billion connections by 2024.
The Ericsson forecast (box, page 3) says
long-range IoT is growing at twice the rate
of short-range IoT (23 percent, versus 12 percent), and the engine of its growth is cellular
IoT, standardized in 4G-LTE and 5G-NR as NBIoT and LTE-M, which will contribute about
half of cellular IoT volumes in 2026. Quite
where non-cellular low-power wide-area
(LPWA) tech like LoRaWAN and Sigfox feature
in Ericsson’s figures is unclear (they are either
ignored, or grossly under-estimated).
Berg Insight agrees (box, page 2) that NBIoT and LTE-M will grow in influence, starting
from now, and be the dominant force in
long-range IoT by 2025. (It also suggests their
non-cellular equivalents will show a decent
turn-of-pace in the period.) These pages tell
how NB-IoT – as, arguably, the significant
force in cellular IoT – is shaping up; that it has
been waylaid by technical issues and strategic foul-ups, but that it will not be denied.
About the structure of this report. The NBIoT story is told here in five parts, from five
interviews with five industry types. The first
two are with hardware providers; the last
two are with airtime providers; these explain
the challenges with NB-IoT in two episodes,
about hardware and airtime. The middle
interview is with an analyst, and provides
context about the enterprise sector. The narrative also unfolds in two list-style articles,
each with 10 entries scattered through the
pages. These present 10 key NB-IoT deployments, covering everything from metering
to tracking, and 10 key NB-IoT challenges,
drawing points from the main interviews.
The report can be read page-by-page, or section-by-section.
Cellular LPWA share of IoT
– less than 10% in 2026
T
he latest ‘mobility report’ from
Ericsson says IoT momentum is
gathering around newer cellular
tech, including NB-IoT and LTE-M.
Some of the terminology gets confusing,
but the message is IoT traffic on legacy
2G and 3G networks, much of it from a
pre-IoT machine-to-machine (M2M) era,
is being matched finally by the rush over
4G and 5G, as the price of hardware reduces, the variety of apps multiplies, and
business cases get clearer.
Ericsson forecasts there will be over
26.4 billion IoT connections in 2026. The
lion’s share (20.6 billion; almost fourfifths) of these are on short-range IoT
tech, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; cellular
IoT will account for 5.4 billion by the
end of the period, it says. Massive IoT
connections on NB-IoT and LTE-M will
increase by almost 80 percent during
2021 to reach close to 330 million; these
will comprise 46 percent of all cellular IoT
connections in 2026 (about 2.48 billion
out of 5.4 billion).
By 2026, 44 percent (2.16 billion) of
cellular IoT connections will count as
‘broadband IoT’ in Ericsson’s terminology, on either 4G or 5G. The rest (about
10 percent) will be on old 2G and 3G
networks. Ericsson said 5G is extending
to more IoT devices through the end of
2021, including to cameras, virtual reality
headsets, and unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs / drones), and into more sensitive
time-critical communications in 2022.
But 4G will remain the dominant cellular IoT technology in 2026, it said. Support for time-critical communications,
with ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC)
aspects in Releases 16 and 17 of the 5G
standard – for remote control of robots,
cloud robotics, cloud gaming, and, notably for Industry 4.0, with the introduction of time-sensitive networking (TSN)
for niche industrial automation – will
comprise a minor share of the broadband IoT count.
Cumulative IoT
connections
(billions)
2020
2026
CAGR
Long-range IoT
1.7
5.8
23%
– Cellular IoT
1.6
5.4
23%
Short-range IoT
10.7
20.6
12%
Total
12.4
26.4
13%
Cellular IoT
connections
(billions)
5
4
3
2
1
0
2020
2022
Massive IoT –
NB-IoT / LTE-M
Broadband / Critical
IoT – 4G / 5G
2024
2026
Legacy M2M –
2G / 3G
Source: Ericsson
3
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
PART 1 |
Between a rock and a hard
place – how NB-IoT escaped
the long shadow of 5G...
... and 2G and LTE-M; IoT hardware maker Sequans says NB-IoT is a
story of missed opportunities, only now coming to a proper climax
T
he problem with NB-IoT, says Sequans, is it has been over-hyped and
undervalued by the operator community, which brought it to life five
years ago to counter the perceived threat
from non-cellular low-power wide-area
(LPWA) equivalents, most notably LoRaWAN
and Sigfox. Reports of its demise are greatly
exaggerated, the market says, but there is no
question its growth has been stunted, and its
story has been hard to watch.
Jeremy Gosteau, senior director of IoT
product marketing at the firm, says NB-IoT
was caught between a rock and a hard place,
between the novelty of anything-goes 5G
and the legacy of anywhere-goes 2G and 3G.
More than this, NB-IoT was wrong-footed by
LTE-M (Cat-M), its cellular-based sister-tech,
developed by a different camp, and originally geared for different ends (see box, page 6).
He comments: “5G came so quickly after
Release 13 [of LTE-M and NB-IoT], so that operators deployed one or the other differently
in each region – in North America, Europe,
China. And all the marketing and technical
rush to deploy 5G stopped some of the investment to bring LTE-M and NB-IoT to the
right technical maturity. So it has taken time.
But the technology is right, and the pricing is
4
right – at least from a hardware perspective.”
PINCER MOVEMENT
“The marketing and technical
rush to deploy 5G stopped
some of the investment to
bring LTE-M and NB-IoT to the
right technical maturity... {And}
LTE-M has complicated the
picture.”
Jeremy Gosteau, Senior Director,
IoT Product Marketing, Sequans
We will come back to the issues of pricing,
as well as to roaming and interoperability;
we should stick, for now, with the pincer
movement that has forced NB-IoT into the
shadows, and which has been appended and
sharpened by its enforced competition with
LTE-M alongside. “LTE-M has complicated the
picture. These two technologies came out at
the same time – one pushed by China, the
other by the western RAN vendors and operators,” says Gosteau.
“There was a huge overlap in terms of airtime costs, and not much distinction – even
though they are different technologies, to
serve different use cases. The market missed
the chance to distinguish NB-IoT’s value. I
mean, NB-IoT is fundamentally different. It
works in the guard band (see page 5), which
is free spectrum for operators – it is like the
SMS of 2G, transmitting P2P information for
free, with no impact on legacy LTE capacity.”
He goes on: “Operators could have come
up with dedicated data plans for the guard
bands. There is nearly no cost for them – they
have to pay-for and monetise upgrades to
their base stations, but that is pretty much
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#1 | WATER METERS, CHINA
China Telecom +
Shenzhen Water
Group (2017/18)
T
N
B-IoT uses a 200 KHz frequency
band, which corresponds to
one resource block in GSM and
LTE transmissions. NB-IoT can
be deployed in three ways: in standalone
operation, guard-band operation, and inband operation.
Standalone operation describes a deployment where NB-IoT is used exclusively
within a spectrum holding, whether in a
private or public arrangement. This implementation gives the best performance.
The world’s first standalone private NBIoT network launched in Florida in 2019,
using a sliver of 700 MHz. The Upper 700
MHz A Block is a 1 MHz paired (2 MHz
IN-BAND
NB-IoT
LTE carrier
GUARD BAND
NB-IoT
LTE carrier
OWN BAND (STANDALONE)
NB-IoT
he classic NB-IoT study, perhaps; certainly the first for
water metering, and the model
for everything with NB-IoT metering that has come after. The city of
Shenzhen, home to Huawei, is ranked
among the most water-scarce cities in
China, the story goes, and was (some
time ago) sliding into a water deficit
of 694 million cubic metres per year.
Shenzhen Water Group worked with
China Telecom and Huawei on an NBIoT connected water network to better
manage its reserves.
The initial scope was to collect data
from 1,200 NB-IoT meters and monitor
pipes to 4,500 people. As with all oldworld utility networks, staff had previously gone to households to measure,
assess, and resolve issues; the task was
labour intensive, inefficient, and costly.
China Telecom’s NB-IoT network, at 800
MHz, provides the coverage and penetration from around 500 compatible
base stations. Its cloud management
platform issues alerts on “data pressure” (water pressure?) at different
nodes; comparing readouts allows the
utility to find leaks and take action.
NB-IoT recorded higher data accuracy and wider coverage (20dB gain over
existing tech) for underground meters,
said China Telecom. The project “set
the pace for full utilization of NB-IoT
in China’s water industry,” said a GSMA
writeup, proclaiming as well the project established “new benchmarks,
applications, and business models” for the wider IoT market.
Three NB-IoT deployment
models – and a warning
GSM carrier
total, split evenly between the downlink
and uplink channels) block of spectrum,
licensed by the FCC in the US. NB-IoT is
suited to its paired structure, noted Puloli, the San Francisco-based startup which
has launched the network. Puloli has developed a custom channel and band plan,
targeting utilities and other critical infrastructure industries. It claims a distance of
up to 25 miles from its tower sites, making
it “one of the most capital efficient” ways to
connect industrial assets.
But every other NB-IoT network
launched so far has been deployed by
telecoms operators using the LTE guard
band, a buffer between strips of spectrum
carrying mobile broadband services. All of
these utilise the unused resource blocks
within an LTE carrier’s guard band, which
impacts performance.
The justification is cellular IoT networks
will be ringfenced from spectrum refarming by using the guard band. But guard
bands serve a purpose: they are intended as narrow, unused pieces of spectrum
between wider-frequency radio bands to
stop interference between GSM and LTE
carriers. The signal-to-noise ratio increases
for NB-IoT if it co-exists with noise roll-off
from other channels, and performance
suffers – and misses the kind of advertised
levels typically claimed by operators. “It is a
great example of how this industry can be
misleading,” comments one sage industry
source.
The third implementation mode, inband operation, utilises, resource blocks
within an LTE carrier that are otherwise
used for mobile broadband resources. This
method impacts both NB-IoT and LTE performance, as it bundles the former directly
into the latter’s channels.
5
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
it. They could have thought to distinguish
between high-end LPWA LTE-M and low-end
LPWA NB-IoT – for all kinds of LoRa-like apps,
like trackers, sensors, smoke detectors, garbage collectors, smart parking, and so on.”
“Customers come to us,
asking to get the price
down to $3, to go into
Europe and Asia. But
they want GPS, which
is another buck, and
connectivity, which is
another $10... [And] in
the end, the hardware costs
aren’t that significant. So, yes,
it has been frustrating.”
DEAL BREAKER
The subtext is hardware companies have
held up their ends of the bargain, by forcing
down module costs to around $5 for single-mode units, while the operator set, in its
distraction and confusion, is putting LTE-M
airtime costs, for a hot-blooded tech that
barely makes the ‘low-power’ grade, against
a lizard-like standard running a cold-blooded
pulse for battery-powered sensors.
NB-IoT was supposed to be ‘the little train
that could’; tickets have been sold like it is an
inter-city locomotive. Has it been frustrating? “Yes,” says Gosteau. “Because customers
come to us, asking to get the price to $2 or
$3, to go into Europe, South America, Asia.
But they want GPS, which is another buck,
and connectivity, which is another $10 – and
it gets to the point where they ask why we’ve
worked so hard to get the hardware costs
down. Because in the end, the hardware is
not that significant as a proportion of the
total cost. So, yes, it has been frustrating. But
that is what it is, and it is also the role we play
in the ecosystem – to educate customers,
talk to operators, and find a way to through.”
Invariably, the China story gets told (and
retold on pages 10-14); that 90 percent (or 85
or 95 percent?) of the market is there, while
the rest of the world dithers over NB-IoT or
LTE-M. Sequans has run the numbers, taking
its own measure from various analysts, and
reckons around 100 million LPWA units have
been sold in China this year (2020/21). “China
is really where the action is, as it stands – the
rest of the world, all together, only accounts
for about five million NB-IoT units,” says Gosteau. He says the China market for LPWA
network connections splits roughly 60/40
between NB-IoT and Cat-1.
The latter is a forebear of LTE-M (Cat-M1),
spun out as the first LTE-based IoT standard,
being rapidly displaced by a more efficient
brood. It has a headstart, and yet NB-IoT has
kept pace, and more so, since the turn of the
6
Jeremy Gosteau, Senior Director,
IoT Product Marketing, Sequans
Cellular IoT tech comparison
NB-IoT
Cat-NB1
LTE-M
Cat-NB2
Rel. 13, 2016 Rel. 14, 2017
180 kHz
180 kHz
Half
Half
20, 23 dBm 14, 20, 23 dBm
~127 kbps
~26 kbps
~159 kbps
~62 kbps
<10s
Data
Data
OTDOA, E-CID
Cell ID
1,000,000
200,000
15km
15km
1 0-15 years
1 0-15 years
Limited / Idle Full / Connected
3GPP Release
Channel bandwidth
Duplex mode
Transmit power
Downlink rate
Uplink rate
Latency
Voice / Data
Positioning
Cell capacity
Max range
Battery life
Mobility
Cat-M1
Cat-M2
Rel. 13, 2016
1.4 MHz
Full / Half
20, 23 dBm
1 Mpbs
1 Mpbs
10-15ms
Voice + Data
1,000,000
10km
~1 0 years
Full / Connected
Rel. 14, 2017
5 MHz
Full / Half
20, 23 dBm
2.4 Mbps
2.6 Mbps
n/a
Voice + Data
OTDOA, E-CID
10km
~1 0 years
Full / Connected
Faceoff – the above compares Release 13 and 14 versions of NB-IoT and LTE-M, which commentators suggest are
aligning in service of mMTC; the tell-tale is the introduction of ‘live’ mobility in NB2 for asset tracking, but other
technical metrics suggest LTE-M and NB-IoT will continue to be distinctive. Note, this table is curated from various
(often contradictory) sources, as a best-effort tally of their respective capabilities.
Source: various
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
How do NB-IoT and LTE-M
fit into mMTC in 5G NR?
The holy trinity of
I
5G service classes
n case of doubt, NB-IoT and LTE-M are not
5G technologies. There is a misconception
about this, that they represent either the
new 5G NR componentry for massive machine-type (mMTC) – to go alongside, effectively, consumer and industrial versions of
5G to serve the other service classes in a holy
trinity of 5G NR variants (eMBB and URLLC;
see right) – or else they are to be superseded
by incoming 5G NR standards for low-power
mMTC. The first of these statements is wrong,
and the second is true in ways, but meaningless – and wrong, ultimately.
Adarsh Krishnan at ABI research puts the
record straight on the first. “They are 4G
technologies; the 5G standard is backwards compatible so they operate natively in the 5G core. That is what they
mean when they say NB-IoT is a 5G technology. But it is mostly marketing.” Right;
and what about their role now and in the
future in the mMTC field, as defined in 5G
NR? Let’s go back, briefly, to the beginning.
IOT REQUIREMENTS
The International Telecoms Union (ITU) said
five years ago that a new mMTC standard,
started in Release 13, was required to serve
the explosion of IoT services with cellular
tech. These requirements were five-fold, and
have come to underpin the core character
of sundry LPWA tech. The terms remain that
mMTC networks enable battery life of 10
years, penetration of 164 dB, throughput
of 160 bits per second, coverage density to
support of up to a million devices per square
kilometre, round-trip latencies of less than 10
seconds, payloads of 20 bytes, and – crucially
for massive scale – ultra-low cost hardware.
A sixth requirement was also defined: that
mMTC
- Massive IoT / LPWA Smart cities
Smart logistics
Smart metering
LTE-M use 15 kHz sub-carriers, as per LTE, and
5G NR defines any sub-carrier in a doubling
sequence from 15 kHz to 240 kHz. NB-IoT and
LTE-M have a similar structure in the time domain, too. In IoT, a slot is specified as 0.5 ms, a
sub-frame is 1ms, and a frame is 10ms; in 5G
NR, the sub-frame and frame are consistent
with LTE timings, and the slot affords more
flexibility anyway. There is no conflict here.
CORE NETWORKS
But there is more work in the core network
and system level. TDD mode, important in 5G
NR, has been defined already for NB-IoT and
LTE-M, prior to Release 16. The problem is the
5G core is geared towards eMBB, which
URLLC
eMBB
puts the highest priority on throughout,
and contradicts the requirements of
- Critical comms - Broadband comms mMTC, prioritizing power-limiting funcAutonomous vehicles
Immersive video
Smart grid
AR / VR apps
tions such as high latency, power save
Factory automation
3D video
mode (PSM), and extended discontinuous reception (eDRX). These last two are
problematic for roaming, as well (see NB-IoT
Challenge #2), but are being addressed so 5G
mMTC should support new features, includ- networks support both eMBB and mMTC.
Gus Vos, chief engineer at Sierra Wireless,
ing positioning, mobility (see box, page 6;
NB-IoT Challenge #7), multicast comms, and writes: “3G UMTS and 4G LTE use different
time-division duplexing (TDD), where the core networks, which creates complexity and
up/downlink are in different time slots in the costs, [which has] driven operators to depsame band. NB-IoT and LTE-M are delivering recate 3G to get to a single core. The same
on these terms, through Releases 13 and 14. is not true [of LTE]... designed to operate inThe max transmission power for NB-IoT has band [with] an NR system.” And so, we find,
been fixed at 14 dBm, and techniques like mMTC, this cornerstone of 5G (with eMBB
wake-up signalling and early data transmis- and URLLC), has been set down already in
sions have been wrapped into NB2. Release LTE with NB-IoT and LTE-M, but will be made
16 sets out the template for NB-IoT and LTE-M stronger with the arrival of new 5G NR systo co-exist in 5G NR; the GSMA rules: “Today, tems. Says Vos: “5G will offer new capabilities... but for IoT, the revolution –with LTE-M
NB-IoT and LTE-M are part of the 5G family.”
In the physical layer, their coexistence with and NB-IoT – is already here [and] future
5G NR is already worked out: NB-IoT and proofed.”
7
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
year. “It is a good trend because Cat-1 is a mature technology, not intended to go as-massive. So NB-IoT is following in the path of Cat
1, which is still growing today.” The numbers,
he explains, are for single-mode units, without alternative cellular fallback (to 2G, 3G,
or regular 4G-LTE). “They would be different
with fallback, I’m sure,” he says. “Sixty percent
of the Cat-1 market is in China, today, just
because of the non-selection of LTE-M – and
because not all apps can be addressed with
NB-IoT. The rest is elsewhere.”
The lesson from China is about airtime
pricing, he says. “China produced really good
data plans, enough to motivate NB-IoT deployments nationally. That hasn’t been the
case elsewhere. The thing is the technology is good, and it could be great, already, if
enterprises were able to pay 10 bucks all-in
– for the hardware, connectivity, SIM – and
just build it, deploy it, and forget about it, so
it works for five or 10 years with no recurring
costs. But that hasn’t been the way, so far;
data plans are still too expensive.”
Global 2G and 3G
sunset times
Source: GSMA
2G
3G
Brazil
Canada
Mexico
US
Claro
Bell
Telcel
AT&T
12/2023
Closed
12/2024
Closed
12/2025
12/2022
12/2026
02/2022
China
India
Japan
Korea
Unicom
Airtel
NTT
SK
Ongoing
12/2023
No service
Korea
Ongoing
Closed
03/2026
SK
Germany
Nordics
Spain
UK
Vodafone
Telia
Vodafone
EE
12/2025
12/2025
12/2025
12/2025
Closed
12/2025
No info
12/2022
America
Asia
Europe
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#1 | ROAMING COVERAGE
I
oT roaming is being sorted, we hear.
But it has been a long road, and there is
hard-going ahead. Part of the problem
is just with coverage; NB-IoT is running
at about twice the rate of LTE-M in terms
of deployments (see page 2), but there
is still not enough of it on the international scene for truly global IoT solutions
– without considerable planning and negotiation. “Availability is still patchy,” says
Adarsh Krishnan at ABI Research.
The importance of roaming with NB-IoT,
generally preferred for static sensor installations, is not immediately clear. LTE-M
offers active handover between masts;
NB-IoT does not, at least in its Cat-NB1
form. But even occasional inter-country
handshakes between sensors and masts
offer valuable readouts about the status of
goods. More importantly, global manufac-
8
turers, offering the kind of contracts that
will come to underpin massive IoT, want to
build once – in anonymous factories – and
deploy everywhere, provisioning devices
market-by-market in easy cloud platforms.
Proper global roaming – as well as iSIM
functionality (NB-IoT Challenge # 5), and
probably incoming Cat-NB2 capabilities
(#7) – is urgently required.
More networks and more roaming deals
are required. “The tech is global, but the
deployments are regional,” says Svein-Egil
Nielsen at Nordic Semiconductor. Vodafone agrees; but it emphasizes the ground
already covered, not the road to go. “We
have finally established a common playing field – before everyone was just in
their own sandpits. We are all going
the same way; that is the maturity
we now see with NB-IoT.”
But Gosteau’s view is not a downer, actually. NB-IoT is not dead, anymore than IoT is
dead, he says; it is just expectations of NB-IoT
are conflated with expectations of IoT. And
IoT is a hard nut to crack – or its cracking has
fragmented so far that it is a challenge to put
it together again. As a cautionary tale about
the distance between hype and reality, even
in telecoms, it is hard to beat.
IOT STANDARDS
But the NB-IoT market has reasserted some
buoyancy. Roaming is being sorted, acknowledges Gosteau; airtime pricing has improved
(NB-IoT Challenge #3). He is optimistic, invariably, promoting a dual-band NB-IoT / LTE-M
strategy for his company to global markets.
No, IoT is not about to get ‘massive’, yet, he
says; it is a slow burn, rather than a pyrotechnic explosion, which will perhaps grow out of
a bonfire of telco vanities.
But the cellular-side is filled with opportunity. And, the message is, NB-IoT is finding its
way out of the dark, as the 5G and 2G shadows retreat, and its value gets clearer. “I see
positive things for NB-IoT,” says Gosteau. “2G
and 3G are ‘sunsetting’ in many countries and
regions in the next five years (see box). And
there is no other choice for massive IoT. There
is no NR provision for low-power IoT. All the
5G data rates address eMBB and URLLC (see
page 7). For mMTC, it is about extending
LTE-M and NB-IoT. Release 17 and 18 introduce RedCap and e-RedCap for down-to-10
Mbps applications. But for the few-hundred
kbps-types of apps, which is the target for
LTE-M and NB-IoT, there is no equivalent. So
LTE-M and NB-IoT will extend – and will do
so also because of the non-promise of LoRaWAN and Sigfox.”
Ouch, on that last point. Actually, Gosteau
is complementary about rival non-cellular
tech, at least for private industrial and parochial national setups. But the final irony is the
industry’s blurring of NB-IoT and LTE-M in the
early days is being made real in the standardisation process (NB-IoT Challenge #7). “Where
these technologies have been quite distinct,
they become increasingly aligned with CatNB2. They are getting closer; the distinction
is narrowing all the time.”
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
Connect, manage and
monetize your fleet with
BICS global IoT solutions
Transform your transportation business and tap into the
power of IoT. Offer customers automated track-and-trace
and improved visibility of shipments as they move across
international borders.
Create a standout offering with seamless global service
unrestricted by national or network borders – while assuring
revenues.
BICS SIM for Things provides reliable, high-quality SIM
or eSIM-based global connectivity for IoT projects for
transportation.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
IoT connectivity in over 200 countries
Fully owned, virtualized global core network
Easy-to-use SIM management platform
API-enabled
Secure infrastructure
Flexibility and autonomy
No commercial lock-ins
Tap new markets and industries, and increase efficiencies.
Realize the full potential of your transportation business.
Contact us to find out more.
bics.com/services/global-iot/
9
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
PART 2 |
‘No one is making money’ –
the China NB-IoT story is a
cautionary tale, say some
The China model is supposed to be the blueprint for massive NB-IoT;
not so, says Nordic Semiconductor – not if you want to make money
L
et us take a different look at the
China story. Its model for NB-IoT –
state-sponsored incentives, flat-rated airtime pricing, commoditization of hardware – is not all it is cracked
up to be, reckon some. Market stats, from
various analyst groups, suggest the lion’s
share (let’s settle on 90 percent) of the
NB-IoT market, today, exists in China. “Yes,
and zero percent of the profits,” responds
Svein-Egil Nielsen, chief technology officer
at Nordic Semiconductor.
“No one is making money in China,” he
says. Nielsen has a justifiable reputation in
the market as a straight talker. The Chinese
example, he says, should be considered
like a cautionary tale, for NB-IoT hardware
providers in particular. The temptation
to show it to the rest of the world as the
blueprint to make NB-IoT add up for enterprises is wrong-headed, he says. “That is
the learning from China – that no one has
made any money.”
He explains: “Which you shouldn’t copy,
ever. China commoditized NB-IoT to the
extent profit vanished from the market.
The incentives and specifications that
went into the NB-IoT market in China mean
every water meter looks the same. They are
10
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#2 | PARKING SENSORS, GERMANY
Deutsche Telekom + City of Hamburg (2018)
H
ardly massive IoT, but Deutsche
Telekom’s NB-IoT deployment
in a Hamburg car park was one
of the earliest in Europe, from
back when the whole ‘smart city’ concept
still anchored most of the IoT conversation – before its constituent parts gained
momentum to cut loose of their moorings
and go under their own steam. Still, back
in 2018, this looked like a proper city-IoT
deal, for 11,000 NB-IoT sensors and an app
to provide data about their availability.
The project was originally green-lighted because Hamburg was to host the ITS
World Congress in 2021 – this year. As it
goes, Covid-19 has abated enough that
the 2021 event will go ahead, and car
spaces will be scarce. So maybe the city’s
NB-IoT network will get a proper workout.
Deutsche Telekom has had a hand in
similar NB-IoT initiatives in Bonn (earlier,
in 2017), Dortmund, Moers, Duisburg, and
Darmstadt. The message is smart parking
in Germany is contributing decent IoT
numbers, probably, and that ‘smart cities’
are a thing, actually.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
11
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
building to the same spec – they should be
with this standard, and perform like this
and this, and be pin-compatible. So you
can plug-in modules from any vendor.
“That doesn’t do anything but drive
commoditization. In the end, the only difference [between NB-IoT modules] is the
price. So China went very quickly to zero
profits, and very low cost and very little value. So I don’t think China is a good example
of how to do things. Maybe it made sense
in China, which just wanted to get the price
down on water meters. Maybe that was the
thing to do. But the market hasn’t come
out of it any more robust or innovative.”
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#2 | INTEROPERABILITY FIXES
T
CHINESE WHISPERS
Which runs somewhat contrary to our conversation with rival chipmaker Sequans,
which says China effectively broke the
technology, in a good way. It innovated
not only with flat-rate data plans, even rolling them in with module costs to establish
singular lifetime pricing (“10 bucks all-in –
for hardware and connectivity”), but with
brand new IoT applications, often by virtue
of the rock-bottom pricing.
For the end-user market, and for the technology at large, the China story worked,
the message from Sequans goes. By contrast, Nielsen says China went too soon and
too fast; he suggests other major cellular
markets – Europe, and North America to a
lesser extent – are now bringing the noise,
even if they are late to the party, as always,
and the likes of Sigfox and LoRaWAN have
had the floor largely to themselves.
“They might have thought about the
business case, but they just made it an unattractive place to do business,” he reflects.
As one commentator noted last week, in
response to this article’s publication online, the government in China directed IoT
with the goal to build a connected society
for the future, and not to drive profitable
business in the near term. As another observed, Nordic Semiconductor offers the
“most expensive combi-module on the
market”, and “China is known for its low
prices” – and Qualcomm and others are
making money in China.
12
Apps – smart metering and bike rentals (above) have
dominated NB-IoT cases in China; Telia in Norway has led
the developing smart-farming charge with NB-IoT trackers for sheep (below; see NB-IoT Deployments #3, right)
he point above (#1), that NBIoT is a global tech (regionally
deployed), is not exactly true.
Technical discrepancies between deployments impact interoperability, and
therefore global availability – roaming
between markets and, even, roaming
on disjointed network infrastructure
in-market. In general, cellular roaming
is well standardized by the GSMA. But
certain NB-IoT features complicate the
picture: specifically, two functions designed to conserve battery power.
These functions, power saving mode
(PSM) and extended discontinuous reception (eDRX), enable an NB-IoT device to turn off its radio whilst remaining
registered to the network, and deactivate from listening to the network. But
neither function is aligned across NB-IoT
in LTE. Operators configure their timers
differently in order to orchestrate power consumption (sleep/hibernate) for
dominant apps in their markets.
This conflict poses problems when
devices roam between networks, and
there is no easy way around. “There are
challenges to deploy devices with simple configurations of PSM and eDRX
across multiple countries – it requires
some compromise by the enterprise. So
there remains complexity, and I don’t
know how it will be resolved– it is very
much about the radio configuration,”
comments Luc Vidal-Madjar, in charge
of IoT and M2M at BICS.
There is more; an IoT device in PSM or
eDRX mode cannot be contacted from
the network side, impacting crucial
eSIM and iSIM functionality (#5) in NBIoT, potentially even deactivating the
SIM function. As such, the module is often required to house a second radio,
normally 2G, for initial contact and
further provisioning.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#3 | SHEEP TRACKERS, NORWAY
“If you want to do water
meters in China with NB-IoT,
you’re not going to make
any money... [And] we don’t
want to do a pin-compatible
product that competes
with a manufacturer that
doesn’t report profits to
shareholders.”
Telia + Nortrace (‘17)
A
Svein-Egil Nielsen, Chief
Technology Officer,
Nordic Semiconductor
DRAGGING HEELS
But, still; the message, generally, is different – that Europe, and everywhere else,
has dragged its heels on NB-IoT. The case
put forward by Sequans, and others besides, is that hardware providers in these
parts have held up their ends of the bargain, and innovated to bring costs down
(to around $5 per module), and to integrate dual-mode connectivity with LTE-M
as well (for about $7) to patch-up scanty
global cellular IoT coverage.
And that the carriers have had their
heads turned by 5G, and brains scrambled by LTE-M; that they have categorically
failed to distinguish NB-IoT as a technology
and tailor pricing for the kinds of rock-bottom sensor applications it supports. Until
now, anyway; the likes of BICS and Vodafone claim to have it cracked (see pages
20-23, 24-26). Nielsen shares the same frustration; that hardware makers have done
most of the donkey work on NB-IoT.
But his bigger point about the China
story also stands; the race to the bottom is
not just about straight cost, but the ability to draw value and drive demand – and
for supply firms to leverage premiums by
distinguishing their products. That is how
the business of innovation should work,
Nielsen seems to say; otherwise it is just
a commodity market – which sure seems
sudden for a ‘disruptive’ tech (see pages 1618) supposed to inspire a revolution of new
industrial value.
What he actually says, very plainly, is that
business is business, and Nordic Semiconductor is not prepared to do bad business
in China. “If you want to go after water meters in China with NB-IoT, you are not going
to make any money. And as a publicly traded company in Norway, that precludes us
entering that market. We don’t want to do
a pin-compatible product that competes
with a manufacturer that doesn’t need to
report profits to shareholders.”
At the same time, he is defensive of the
European delay with NB-IoT, at least the
notion the market in general has ‘dragged
its heels’. “There is this thing that Europeans have a different mindset somehow, but
I am not sure they are dragging their feet
necessarily; it is just that things take time,”
he reasons. “The thing is people want to
make money. Which is somehow forgotten.
And that applies to carriers, and it applies
to vendors like ourselves.”
nother entry that features
more because of the ground
it broke than the sensors it
connected (see #2 and #10).
But this one is fun, even if just for the imagery you can stick in a news article (see
page 12), and covers an important IoT
sector: smart agriculture. Telia worked
with start-up Nortrace to connect 1,000
sheep to its NB-IoT network somewhere outside of Stavanger in Norway,
some time back in 2017. It had already
launched a smart-farming service in late
2016 to monitor irrigation in fields. But
tracking was new for NB-IoT, compared
to static monitoring.
The tracker, called Shiip (for tracking
ships, as well as sheep?), is a collar with
an NB-IoT/GPS combi-unit, plus other
sensors. It was installed to bounce a
signal off an NB-IoT base station in the
Rogaland countryside, and back to the
cloud and down to a smartphone app
– to give the farmer data about the position and well-being of the flock.
It was only a pilot, but others have
followed. Telstra talks about NB-IoT for
agricultural change – “a network that
makes the future possible for regional
and rural Australia”. Cisco is presenting
NB-IoT as part of a curious ‘5G’ mashup,
also including LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi, to
track 2,000 cows in Somerset in the UK
as part of the 5G RuralFirst scheme.
Logic says Vodafone is handling the
NB-IoT leg, on the grounds it is doing the
same for coastal monitoring in another
5G RuralFirst trial (#10). Meanwhile, Telia
has gone on to more massive IoT-things,
including connecting at least 100,000
garbage bins in Norway, and two million electric meters with the main
power utilities in Sweden (#9).
13
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#3 | COST CALCULATIONS
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#4 | ELECTRIC BIKES, CHINA
China Mobile + City
of Zhengzhou (‘19)
N
Collaboration – Vodafone, via its new grandcentrix business, is working with Nordic on bespoke NB-IoT bundles
T
his appears, from the meta-narrative in this report, to have been
remedied (see pages 24-32); but
rather like with roaming, the solution has only just revealed itself and there
is work for the industry to observe the
picture. Meanwhile, the rival non-cellular
IoT market has been hammering out TCO
terms with enterprises since the middle of
last year, at least. Better late than never;
but the pace of cellular invites more lostground to LoRaWAN and Sigfox.
But, in these pages, Nordic Semiconductor, an IoT chipmaker in the IoT module game, and Vodafone Business, a tierone carrier apparently untroubled by 5G
hype, settle on a ballpark fee for NB-IoT.
Vodafone has started bidding at €12.99
for 10 years; its ‘grandcentrix’ dev-house in
Cologne is bundling airtime into bespoke
NB-IoT solutions for enterprises, and its
outlook has shifted 180 degrees on IoT,
compared with old airtime sales. The philosophy, which still sounds like marketing,
is the same co-creation shtick that is supposed to bridge the IT/OT divide in Industry 4.0 – that enterprises are ‘partners’ and
not just ‘customers’ anymore.
But this new consultancy approach is
14
“There are all kinds of practical issues with NB-IoT, still.
But $50 over 10 years makes
sense to the customer, and
makes sense to the industry.”
only novel to operators; most of the IoT
industry has been discussing the minutiae
of TCO for some time. Which is why Nordic,
with the kind of red line on profit margins
that stops it from entering China (see pages 1-13), is the one in this exercise to quote
an easy TCO figure – $50 for hardware, airtime, and application. Hardware pricing is
important; the lower it goes the more that
gets connected. But understanding the
value IoT delivers is more important.
As hardware prices fall in China, they
have stabilised everywhere else, at a level that works for all sides – for enterprise
users, airtime providers, hardware makers,
and solution developers. “There are all
kinds of practical issues with it, but $50 for
10 years makes sense to the customer, and
to the industry,” says Nordic. Progress is
good, then; the challenge is for the
wider market to grasp the nettle.
ot the first NB-IoT use case
that comes to mind, perhaps,
and not the one (water meters) that has made all the
running in China, but an important one
– and, it turns out, the “largest-scale NBIoT application for a single service in
the world”, according to the GSMA. This
solution, devised by China Mobile and
Huawei for the Zhengzhou Public Security Bureau received the ‘best smart
cities innovation in Asia’ award at MWC
Asia in 2019. We don’t like writing about
industry awards much, but this one
stands out amid all the back slapping.
China has more battery powered
bikes that anywhere else. And lots of
bikes means lots of traffic problems.
GSMA-quoted stats claim 70 percent of
thefts, 30 percent of traffic accidents,
and nine percent of fires in 2017 were
caused by electric bikes in Zhengzhou,
in China’s Henan province.
The NB-IoT unit from China Mobile
and Huawei incorporates GPS / BeiDou
positioning, and offers anti-theft tracking, fire warning, and power alarms.
“The success created a blueprint for
other transportation applications,” says
GSMA.
It adds: “For operators, the system can
reuse LTE resources to reduce deployment costs, while developing a large
number of IoT users, and creating new
revenue-generating services. For city
authorities, it provides a crucial tool to
defeat theft and fire... and improve
urban traffic capacity. For [bikers],
it increases the riding efficiency,
safety, and security.”
– D
OW OA
TN OL
OU CK T
I
CL
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: PRIVATE 5G
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
Where and how will
mobile operators
manage private 5G
enterprise networks?
PRIVATE 5G
ENTERPRISE
AUGUST 2021
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
NOCs
15
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
PART 3 |
Disruptive NB-IoT is a hard
sell for anxious enterprises –
the real challenge for IoT
Ten years of financial recession, geopolitical tension, and global
pandemic has made IoT a fraught gamble for wary enterprises
H
e-said / she-said; a last look at the
finger-pointing between the rank
and file in the NB-IoT sector, and a
chance to zoom-out to assess the
wider state of ‘things’. This inter-market bitching is futile, and wrong anyway, says Adarsh
Krishnan, research director at ABI Research.
If we are to play the blame game, to explain
away the deathly pace of NB-IoT takeup outside of China, then there is a third party to
consider: the enterprises themselves.
They are just not ready, reckons Krishnan.
Their anxiety is already sky-high, and rising
– through 10 years of financial recession and
geopolitical trade crises, before Covid-19
forced the global economy into lockdown.
The pandemic has only made them more
wary of ‘disruptive’ tech, he argues. The real
challenge for ‘massive IoT’, and for those
pushing NB-IoT as the springboard for it, is
to make the technology un-risky, un-scary –
un-disruptive.
Krishnan comments: “[The delay] is because of the enterprises – not really the hardware vendors or airtime suppliers. Most of
the technology issues, 80-90 percent, have
been solved. It is more about demand, and
how enterprises want to implement the
technology. That is what’s taking longer. Be-
16
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#4 | CHIP SHORTAGES
T
he impact of the global chip crisis,
has been widely reported on the
automotive and electronics sectors. But the IoT market has been
damaged, as well. “Oh, it’s terrible, across
everything. We are so under-served on
wafers; we could have sold a lot, lot more
this year,” reflects Svein-Egil Nielsen, tech
chief at Nordic Semiconductor.
The diminishing supply is exacerbated
by spiralling demand, as Covid-19 has
obliged society to track everything from
vaccine shipments to social distancing.
Satellite firm Inmarsat says 84 percent
of global companies are accelerating
IoT because of Covid-19; IoT consultancy Eseye says Covid-19 has impacted
the IoT plans of 98 percent of US and UK
enterprises. But the chips are down. For
Nordic, which claims the disjunct will
not to be easily resolved. “The delay is
enormous. We could have shipped
so much more. It will be a terrible
year next year, as well.”
cause the whole of the last decade has been
uncertain – with financial recession, geopolitical issues, now this pandemic, and all
these chip supply issues.
“These have caused anxiety. The supply
side can keep churning out great solutions,
which can help in lots of ways. But unless
enterprises are confident of their own businesses, and certain of their revenues, then
they won’t invest to implement them. Unless
they have to. And they will be cautious for
the next 12-18 months, just to see how the
market bounces back [post-pandemic], and
how revenues stabilise, before they start to
invest in new technology.”
STRAIGHT FIGHTS
A quick recap of the discussion so far. For
hardware vendors and solution providers,
the fault lies with the carrier community (outside China), which has had its head
turned by 5G and brain scrambled by LTE-M.
For their money, operators have failed to get
to grips with NB-IoT. The response from the
other side is that industrial revolution just
takes time. As Vodafone says on pages 24-26,
it is an OEM-driven market, after all.
The implication from Vodafone is its fresh
supply of dirt-cheap NB-IoT in 50-odd territo-
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
ries is decently timed to meet rising demand
in Europe and North America. Most of the
issues – roaming, billing, interoperability –
have been fixed, says this counter-narrative.
And if we are point-scoring, then who says
$5 for hardware goes far enough? Those are
not Vodafone’s words, to be clear; but they
are out there, somewhere, whispered on the
wind of industrial change.
In a straight fight, on hardware availability and pricing, does NB-IoT really promise
a knockout against Sigfox, and particularly
against LoRaWAN, yet? And, what about a
match-up on current-draw, frequency modulation, and developer ecosystems? But, then,
massive IoT is a multi-dimensional headwreck of a market, where suppliers align uneasily behind warring technologies, growing
increasingly paranoid and agitated as they
wait for the penny to drop.
Krishnan comments: “One side points fingers about the billing and the roaming, and
the other side says the hardware still isn’t
cheap enough – especially when LoRaWAN
and Sigfox are talking about less than $5, and
even $1.”
There’s the whisper. Where does his sympathy lie? He probably doesn’t have much, just
because it is not his job to; but as Krishnan
looks at the market, does he understand one
side more than the other? “For me, it is the
fault of neither side,” he responds, diplomatically, perhaps.
GRIM ANCHORAGE
“These are brilliant
technologies, which enable lots
of use cases. But there remains
uncertainty about how they
pay back. That is the reason the
IoT market has not grown as
quickly as expected. ”
Adarsh Krishnan, Research
Director, ABI Research
He gets stuck into his argument that a wild
10-year storm has, conversely, created a grim
anchorage for tech buyers and a dead calm
for tech vendors, and that NB-IoT has simply
struggled to catch a sail. There are exceptions, he notes, in industries like energy and
healthcare, but the general rule is disruptive
tech is hard sell for anxious businesses.
He says: “These are brilliant technologies,
which enable lots of use cases. But there remains uncertainty about how they pay back
– not just in five and 10 years, but in a shorter
time. That is the reason the IoT market has
not grown as quickly as expected. Its value is
clear. This evolution from traditional systems
to IoT-enabled systems is inevitable; the focus on sustainability, for enterprises and their
products and services, won’t work without
tech-backed systems.
“So the viability of IoT is clear, too. The
question is about how you implement it
Tech with benefits – LPWA network connections by app
3.5bn
Commercial
fleet
3bn
2.5bn
Asset
tracking
2bn
Industrial /
environmental
1.5bn
Enterprises – asset tracking will dominate the wider
LPWA section of the IoT market in the next years, says
ABI; growing more than three-fold in 2022-24, and
by two thirds in 2024-26. Vodafone, below, talks up
NB-IoT capabilities case-by-case.
APPLICATIONS
BENEFITS
Gas meters
Battery life, non-continuous
throughput; propagation
Battery life, non-continuous
throughput; propagation
Water meters
Battery life; cheap install; low
/ non-continuous throughput
life; periodic
Smoke / fire alarms Battery
device testing
Battery life;
Garbage sensors
network coverage
life;
Environment sensors Battery
network coverage
Parking monitors
1bn
Buildings &
security
0.5bn
0
Smart
metering
2020
2022
2024
2026
Source: ABI Research
Source: Vodafone
17
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
Uncertainty– enterprises are interested in IoT, but wary after a decade of recession and geopolitical crisis (Image: 123rf)
more efficiently. Which is where the challenge is: how do you transition to these
systems, without disruption? Because IoT is
described as ‘disruptive technology’. But the
market cannot let it disrupt business and
derail enterprises. It has to bring rapid gains.
Because enterprises have faced great uncertainty, most of the last decade. They do not
want another tech-driven uncertainty.”
He adds: “The question is how to make
digital change more seamless – so it is as
least-disruptive as possible. These technologies are quite radical in how they change a
business. But you don’t want this change to
bring problems as well. That is the balance
to strike in the implementation, and what
the industry is trying to solve. Tech providers
have been pushing their solutions, but not
necessarily hearing what enterprises want
and fear.”
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#5 | SMOKE DETECTORS, CHINA
China Unicom + Taihe Ann (2018/19)
A
nother golden oldie from China’s
mad-paced IoT adventures, and a
seminal deal in the history of NBIoT; this one involves China Unicom and Huawei (of course), plus smoke
alarm maker Taihe Ann, IoT module manufacturer Lierda, and systems integrator
Dabang. The five deployed 170,000 NB-IoT
connected smoke alarms in rental homes in
the Yuhang district of Hangzhou in China’s
Zhejiang province. The logic, like with most
IoT jobs, is to get a jump on infrastructure
management – and, in the case of remotely
monitored detectors, operating as “automated sentries”, on disaster scenarios.
The sensors, fitted with 3000mAh batteries and slated to last for three-to-five years,
notify a cloud management platform and
activate related devices, such as alarms,
as the density of smoke or gas goes over
a predetermined threshold. The platform
18
can be organised to alert building owners
or managers, as well as emergency services, via voice and text messages. As they are
battery powered, per the NB-IoT prescription for low-powered IoT, they are well suited to old areas of cities where buildings are
densely packed and sensors are hard to fit.
Taihe Ann is selling NB-IoT smoke alarms
off-the-shelf with radios and airtime from
Huawei and China Unicom; China Unicom
is supplying the units via its enterprise
channels for a monthly rental fee. The
deployment has reduced the cost of fire
monitoring and fire fighting, and improved
response times, said China Unicom.
The 170,000-strong deployment was
supposed to be extended across the whole
city of Hangzhou; but an update on the
project has not been easy to find. Either
way, the project has worked as a harbinger
for similar deployments.
Huawei – involved in most China deals (Image: 123rf)
China Telecom has partnered with Sunsea AIoT to install 500,000 general-purpose
‘smart-city’ NB-IoT sensors across 37 square
kilometres in the Jing’an district in Shanghai to detect smoke and gas (and water
pressure in fire hydrants). China Mobile
has installed 100,000 NB-IoT alarms
for sensing temperature, smoke,
gas, and fire.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
If You Want to Build the World’s Most
Advanced and Powerful IoT Devices
Start with the world’s most advanced and powerful
cellular IoT connectivity solution.
NEKTAR Evaluation Kit
To prototype and evaluate your IoT
solution, Sequans offers the Monarch
2 GM02S NEKTAR Evaluation Kit.
Monarch 2 GM02S
• Pre-paid SIM with global
Includes all features necessary to deploy IoT on a massive scale:
Industry-leading lowest level
power consumption
23 dBm transmit power
Low voltage operation down to 2.2
volts allowing use of low-cost batteries
GSMA-compliant EAL5+ secure
enclave for integrated SIM and
crypto applications
Fully forward compatible
with Monarch 1
Embedded voice processing
acceleration for optimized VoLTE
Programmable RF filtering for global
band support in a Single-SKU
Application CPU supports customer
application software and ultra-low
power sensor hub
IoT-Findit™ location engine supports
indoor and outdoor locating
without GNSS
connectivity included
• Integrated on-board antenna
617-900 Mhz / 1695-2200 Mhz
• Easy power measurement with
external power supply
• NEKTAR-CONNEKT interface
for daughter board
Small footprint module
16.3 X 17 X 1.85 mm
To build ultra-reliable, secure, powerful and cost-effective
IoT devices, contact the leader in cellular IoT.
Contact us today at sales@sequans.com, or visit us online at sequans.com/monarch-2-gm02s-module.
19
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
PART 4 |
Massive IoT starts to come
online – as roaming and
billing finally get sorted
A handful of MVNOs like Belgian firm BICS have taken the challenge
of IoT roaming as an opportunity – and shown the rest how to do it
L
et’s give the floor over to the other
side, to hear in turn from international cellular provider BICS, an old
telco familiar that has reinvented itself as a virtual operator for global IoT, and
UK-headquartered Vodafone, arguably the
staunchest carrier champion of NB-IoT from
the get-go – and the one, apparently, making most progress with it (see pages 24-26).
We should start with BICS, just because its
raison d’etre in IoT is to solve the issues no
one else has.
At the start of 2021, the Belgium-based
firm offered IoT roaming in 30 markets in
total, via either NB-IoT or LTE-M. Today, late
2021, BICS has 12 NB-IoT deals and 30 30
LTE-M tie-ups. But it perceives a late second wind for cellular narrowband, blowing
through the global IoT market. It is now
signing new deals for NB-IoT roaming at a
faster rate than for LTE-M. It has a loose target of “more than 20” NB-IoT arrangements
by year-end (two months away, at writing).
This reflects the global picture; there
were, at last count, twice as many NB-IoT
networks as LTE-M networks (106 versus 53,
according to the GSMA). Significantly, only
Mexico shows up on GSMA maps as a single-mode LTE-M market; everywhere else is
20
doing NB-IoT as well, or NB-IoT on its own.
Importantly, issues with network interoperability and airtime billing, as well as with
roaming, have been dealt with, says BICS.
The valedictory shouts that went up early
last year, from tech rivals and telco critics,
when NTT and DISH ditched NB-IoT in Japan and the US, going backwards on major
infrastructure gambles, now sound like faroff cries, maybe. These episodes say more,
perhaps, about the short-term priorities of
the protagonists than the long-term prospects of the technology, or of the so-called
‘massive IoT’ movement at large.
FINALLY POISED
“The market needs NB-IoT for
massive scale... Even if it has
taken some time, it is starting
to progress for a number of
reasons – there are now more
NB-IoT networks, and more
roaming between them.”
Luc Vidal-Madjar,
Head of M2M and IoT, BICS
For everyone in this report, in fact, NB-IoT is
poised finally to drive the kind of ‘massive’
scale the IoT market has promised for years.
For BICS, which offers cellular roaming of
various sorts via 700 mobile operators in 30
countries, NB-IoT is the growth engine for
the company – without comparison. About
20 percent of the SIMs it sells today go into
modules that support NB-IoT, from virtually
nothing a year ago.
“This has [all] happened this year; last
year, [the percentage] was really very small,”
says Luc Vidal-Madjar, head of M2M and IoT
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
Enterprise IoT – we have it covered. Through our Making Industry Smarter, Digital Factory Solutions, Digital Industry Solutions, and Talking About Industrial Revolution report series, Enterprise IoT Insights brings
in-depth coverage and analysis of the key trends driving digital change. Click cover images to load reports.
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: PRIVATE 5G
TALKING ABOUT (INDUSTRIAL) REVOLUTION
TALKING ABOUT (INDUSTRIAL) REVOLUTION
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: INDUSTRIAL 5G
TALKING ABOUT (INDUSTRIAL) REVOLUTION
APRIL 2021
Where and how will
mobile operators
manage private 5G
enterprise networks?
Conversations
with industry
about
STATE of
‘THINGS’
in SMART
IoTin
PRIVATE 5G HEALTHCARE
AUGUST 2021
ENTERPRISE
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
NOCs
The trouble
with
M AY 2 0 2 1
The
J U LY 2 0 2 1
MANUFACTURING
– connected healthcare got a boost
with Covid-19 – but access to
healthcare innovation hinges on
by Sean Kinney
access to broadband
– how enterprises are grasping for
and grappling with industrial IoT
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
APRIL 2021
INDUSTRIAL
5G SLAs
– industrial 5G network performance,
and the new turf war over the supply
and management of 5G in Industry 4.0
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
DIGITAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS: SHORT + LONG RANGE IOT
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: AUGMENTED REALITY
Better together JULY 2020
Challenges
SHORT
& ONG
with
DIGITAL
CHANGE IN
HEALTHCARE
RANGE
DECEMBER 2020
– from low-level IoT sensing to bigbang 5G and AI; and how Covid-19 has
turned the market both on and off
IOT
– the sudden clamour for hybrid IoT
and why two IoT technologies
are better than one
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
by James Blackman
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: ANALYTICS AND AI
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: METALS & MINING
DIGGING
WITH
DECEMBER 2019
by James Blackman
SEPTEMBER 2019
how connecivity, analytics and
automation are transforming the
mining industry
AI – ON THE LINE
how advanced analytics and artificial
intelligence are transforming the
how
production line
by James Blackman
KEEPING THE
LIGHTS ON
– WITH GREEN
Smart grids and smart meters – how
IoT is bringing order and intelligence
to distributed energy systems
Report sponsor
- and the rise of the workers
How augmented reality is transforming
production, and raising the influence
of workers in the robot age
as a
PLATFORM
– for smart buildings and smart cities,
and how use cases, strategies
and solutions compare
LTE
&5G
how incoming cellular technologies
will transform smart manufacturing
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
Digital
Factory
Solutions
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: PORTS & SHIPPING
iot
SMA R T
POR T S
LPWA
connectivity
Automation and intelligence
with private LTE / 5G networks
and public network slices
a matchup between LoRaWAN
and Sigfox in the blue corner
and NB-IoT and LTE-M in the red
Digital
Industry
Solutions
July 2019
in IoT – who is
winning what?
by James Blackman Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
iot
industrial
by James Blackman
iot
Report sponsor
MAY 2019
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
SMART
LIGHTING
report series
DIGITAL FACTORY
SOLUTIONS:
connectivity
by James Blackman
DIGITAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS: SMART LIGHTING
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS
The promise
of smart
farming and
the challenge of
CONNECTING
AGRICULTURE
INDUSTRIAL AR
APRIL 2020
by James Blackman Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: AGRICULTURE & FARMING
JUNE 2019
POWER
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
by James Blackman
MAY 2019
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: ENERGY & POWER
by James Blackman Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
OCTOBER 2019
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
JULY 2019
DATA
CROSS NG THE
from ‘co-creation’ to ‘co-configuration’
– and the challenge to bring
industrial IoT to scale
Making
Industry
Smarter
by Juan Pedro Tomas
MARCH 2020
by James Blackman, editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
IT
OT
D VIDE
iot
– where are cities
with IoT, 5G and AI,
and where are all the
‘lessons learned’?
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
MAKING INDUSTRY SMARTER: HEALTHCARE
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: AGILE INNOVATION
SMART
CITIES
REPORT
SERIES
FEBRUARY 2019
MARCH 2019
FROM SUPPLY CHAIN
TO DEMAND CHAIN
how IoT and AI are enabling the supply
chain to flex to changing demand
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
AI & IOT
- AT THE when
to bring
CUTTING industrial
intelligence
EDGE closer to the action
REPORT SPONSOR
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
enterpriseiotinsights.com/channels/reports
Talking
About
Industrial
Revolution
iot
21
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
at BICS. He zooms out, and offers some context, explaining the shift with NB-IoT. “The
market needs NB-IoT for massive IoT. And
even if it has taken some time, it is starting
to progress for a number of reasons, mainly
just because the technology is more mature. There are now more NB-IoT networks,
and more roaming between them.”
For the record, another 20 percent of SIMs
from BICS go into LTE-M capable modules,
and the rest into standard cellular fare. Interestingly – and contrastingly with chipmakers Sequans and Nordic Semiconductor, promoting dual-mode NB-IoT/LTE-M
units – Vidal-Madjar reckons there is not
much hardware crossover between these
two technologies; enterprises are choosing
one or the other for global IoT deployments,
he says.
“It is very rare to have modules that do
both… If the enterprise wants as much
global coverage as possible with a single
module, then that is a way forward. That
Roaming– global NB-IoT is opening up (Image: 123rf)
is correct. But so far as we see, enterprises
are making the choice between them; they
don’t combine both. That is the choice we
see,” he explains. It probably reflects more
on BICS’ distribution channels; certainly Sequans and Nordic maintain their dual-mode
strategies are appropriate and correct.
Either way, some of the angst in the cellular IoT market has eased; the message is
NB-IoT is starting to bubble up. Speaking on
a BICS-hosted webinar at the end of 2020,
US electronics distributor Avnet said 70 percent of “cellular requests” from IoT solutions
vendors had clauses about NB-IoT. The big
operators are starting to sign sizable deals;
at least one, Vodafone, is talking about
multi-million sized volume-deployments,
across markets (see pages 24-26).
No other LPWA technology has ever
reached such a scale in single contract deployments, and massive IoT will never make
good on its grand promise without them
– and without such deals falling, suddenly,
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#5 | INTEGRATED SIMS
N
B-IoT limitations give innovators
pause,” writes Ireland-based SIM
specialist Kigen, relation off UK
chip design firm Arm. “For almost
any business, battery life of 10+ years and
the ability to support deployments on a
global scale means frequent carrier changes
– [which] requires a physical switch of SIM
card. The alternative: you’re stuck with the
same operator’s coverage blackspots and
costs for the device’s lifecycle. The possible
solution: remote SIM provisioning (RSP).”
RSP is the only way the IoT industry is going to “break the scale barrier”, as Vodafone
puts it. The GSMA spec’ for RSP enables remote management of operator profiles in
embedded SIM and integrated SIM (eSIM
and iSIM) functions. “Successful scaling of
IoT requires the integration of RSP and NBIoT,” notes Kigen. But NB-IoT is not ready;
continuing issues with roaming and billing
22
(#1 and #3) are holding up multi-market deployments, anyway. More profoundly, NBIoT does not support the necessary functions to deliver the SIM profile over-the-air.
Remote provisioning is conducted via the
SM-SR (subscription manager / secure routing) function using a connectivity ‘bootstrap’; as it stands, the ‘bootstrap’ has to be
carried on standard cellular tech. As well,
the ‘bootstrap’ activates a ‘handshake’ via
SMS, which is also unsupported in NB-IoT.
Any IoT device that excludes SMS in order to
reduce complexity – by ejecting a 2G radio,
for example – precludes the option of RSP,
and over-the-air upgrades. Not ideal.
The workaround is to include for an
SMS-capable technology such as 2G to allow fallback for RSP related operations. This
is how Kigen is getting around the problem,
including with a proprietary iSIM (ahead of
its standardization), moving the SIM into
the permanent hardware array. Kigen is
engaged with Altair (Sony Semiconductor)
and Vodafone on the Bayer project (see, deployment #10), notably. Again, progress is
being made, but it is interminably slow.
Integrated– SIMs in the hardware array
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
like dominoes. The sense is the run is about
to topple. Vidal-Madjar comments: “We are
convinced NB-IoT will play a fundamental
role to drive massive IoT. Many use cases
need extremely long battery life, which NBIoT brings – especially large-scale IoT deployments with no power access.”
TECHNICALLY COMPLICATED
Global IoT roaming is the thing that will
make IoT massive, says BICS. Of course it
does; it is hawking a global IoT SIM, connecting to NB-IoT or LTE-M, plus traditional
cellular for fall-back machine-to-machine
comms. But the market agrees, as well, and
recognises the work by smaller MVNO-style
providers, such as BICS, to offer backend
integration between carrier infrastructure –
on top of wider international roaming.
Vidal-Madjar reflects: “Mobile operators
have worked at roaming, and reinvented
the business model for billing. It has taken
time. But it now works; things are moving.
International connectivity is important
for IoT to take off. Because IoT will only be
successful if it is simple for the enterprises
to deploy in global markets. They want one
SIM card that works everywhere.”
He explains: “Roaming is technically complicated; additional core network elements
have to be interconnected. It is also commercially complicated, because traditional
inter-operator billing charges per-megabyte
of data, and NB-IoT carries only kilobytes of
data – so that model won’t fly.” Generally, billing is better; BICS is offering a monthly NBIoT subscription for less than $1 per month
for the top-end plan, or a single downpayment for the life of the product.
But its message about simplicity will sustain it longer, even as the likes of Vodafone
broker far-away roaming and rock-bottom
billing. “We have simplified global IoT deployments for enterprises, so they don’t need
a local partner in every country. They don’t
need to do local integration with each operator in each different country. But it is more
than just that; because we are making global
deployments manageable. Connectivity is
one part, but it needs to be as simple as possible, as easy as possible – everywhere.”
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#6 | STREET LIGHTS, CHINA
China Mobile + City of Gaoyou (2018/19)
T
his one goes back a couple of years,
like most of the China entries, but
also goes somewhere different:
into the smart street-lighting
space, the traditional reserve of proprietary IEEE 802.15.4 technologies, but is
slowly migrating towards cellular (and
non-cellular) standards. Of these, NB-IoT
appears to be a prime candidate to pick up
business, as China Mobile has demonstrated in Gaoyou, a county-level city under
the administration of Yangzhou, in China’s
Jiangsu province.
In truth, the China Mobile deployment
in Gaoyou followed similar projects by its
country rival China Telecom, which had
already installed 280 NB-IoT controlled
street lamps in pre-commercial trials in
2018 in (we think) Chongqing in China’s
Sichuan province, variously in Xiajing
province, and in the new smart-city development of Xiong’an in Baoding in Hebei
province. But China Mobile, with a deal
with the Yangzhou Gaoyou government,
has released more info about its project.
It says the test case showed NB-IoT
worked, by connecting individual nodes in
the light poles or ‘loop controls’ for clusters
of lamps to a cloud management platform,
to reduce operational costs and also to
establish a platform for further smart-city
sensors. It noted, NB-IoT coverage tends to
be good in cities, where cellular networks
have been densified to cope with busy
populations, and connectivity for lighting
controls is therefore reliable.
And in case you missed it – because it
has been written about in these pages
extensively – smart street-lighting is arguably the clearest smart-anything business case of them all. Remote-controlled
streetlights enable city authorities and
Gaoyou –bright NB-IoT lights, big IoT city
energy utilities to dim lighting in dynamic
fashion, with the seasons and the weather,
as well as for local events. They also introduce live monitoring of performance, and
a means to run preventative maintenance.
All of which drives down energy and labour costs, in the end.
The maths is simple, actually. When the
hefty energy savings from the upgrade
to LED fixture is added-in, the calculation
even reveals a way to bankroll other smartcity apps with softer ROIs, which can be attached to new NB-IoT sensor platforms in
lamp poles. The outlook, then, for NB-IoT
connected street-lights is good. There is
no word, we can find, on how many lights
China Mobile has connected in Gaoyou,
but it has expanded and repeated the project, it implies.
“The city is in a position to expand their
intelligent city services and begin getting
a fuller picture of the status of various
locations as needed. The pilots deployed
in various locations have taught China
Mobile that NB-IoT is a clear contender
to connect large numbers of streetlights and sensors in the future.”
23
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
PART 5 |
Did IoT just get massive?
Vodafone’s multi-million
multi-market NB-IoT deal
Vodafone says it has just signed the biggest ever NB-IoT deal outside
China – a veritable ‘scale breaker’, it says. Is this the tipping point?
A
nd so to Vodafone, and the biggest
single contract in the history of NBIoT, we think; confirmation that IoT
– and specifically the sub-segment
of the market sprung with NB-IoT – has hit
the big time, at last. Almost; maybe just. Because the UK-based operator is about to announce the biggest ever IoT airtime supply
deal outside of China, stretching to millions
of NB-IoT connections.
Vodafone has rock-bottom airtime fees, at
€12.99 for 10 years (a fraction of BICS’ topend global IoT fees, at least), and enough
coverage, in 55 markets and counting, to
make NB-IoT massive, finally, it says. The
contract, with an unnamed manufacturer,
outguns the biggest non-China deals so far
on equivalent low-power wide-area (LPWA)
tech, including LoRaWAN and Sigfox, which
have struggled to break the million-mark on
connection volumes.
It is the news a large chunk of the broader
tech industry, making bets on ‘massive IoT’
as a platform for digital change, has been
waiting for. (And, worth mentioning, in light
of NB-IoT’s travails in the shadow of 5G, and
its confused portrayal even as a 5G technology; it has nothing to do with 5G, just a
cobbled-together LTE spinoff that has been
24
“The various strings are
coming together – the
networks are stronger,
roaming is in place, devices are
rolling off the production line…
It is exciting because it
breaks the scale
barrier.”
Phil Skipper, Group Head
of IoT Strategy and
Business Development,
Vodafone Business
made into a laughing stock by twitchy market watchers.)
But the news is not in, quite yet. Vodafone
is playing its cards close to its chest; there
is no mention, for now, of the identity of its
OEM partner, nor of the nature or remit of
the deal; a formal announcement is pending. But it is multi-market and multi-million,
it says, with IoT units going ready-connect-
ed, rather than bootstrapped for remote
provisioning, into 20-odd markets in Europe,
and wherever Vodafone has op-cos or roaming mates, potentially.
Phil Skipper, group head of IoT strategy
and business development at Vodafone
Business, says the ball of snakes that has so
far strangled cellular IoT – mainly around
billing, roaming, interoperability – has been
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
unravelled, finally. “This was never going
to be a quick game,” he remarks. It is the
same message from BICS, and the same almost-message from most others in this report.
Skipper says: “We are just now starting to
see those first large OEMs coming to market. And there is one, which I can’t say much
about, which is big – it is multi-million connections. This is what we are seeing now;
that the various strings are coming together – the networks are stronger, roaming is in
place, devices are rolling off the production
line… For us, it is exciting because it breaks
the scale barrier. That’s how we see this.”
STRAIGHTISH COURSE
Skipper steps outside of the ring when asked
about the verbal right-hook from hardware
vendors, swinging in the direction of airtime
suppliers, because of their perceived dithering on roaming, billing, and everything else.
Vodafone’s trajectory with NB-IoT has gone
along a straight-ish course, he says, and has
timed just about with the late market demand stirred up by the other side.
“It has taken a long time because it is the
first network to be built only for IoT. And
because you have to roll the network out,
which takes an amount of time, and, more
than that, you have to roll it out so it delivers
the performance the technology promises –
in terms of deep penetration and long battery life. The other reason is the OEMs have
been required to design NB-IoT into their
products – which take time to go from the
drawing board to production.”
He adds: “People forget it is an OEM driven market, and the OEMs are only interested
if there is interoperability. So our focus, as
the IoT business in Vodafone, has been to
build the roaming footprint. You go to an
OEM, and say to use NB-IoT, and they want
to know which countries it works in. And our
answer, now, is that it works across 55 networks – that we have 180-190 networks in
the world, and we are already past 25 percent with NB-IoT.”
The ‘scale-breaking’ deal with the unnamed OEM is a European affair, it might be
noted, extended through roaming across 20
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#6 | MACHINE LEARNING
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#7 | WATER METERS, UK
Vodafone + SES
Water (2020/21)
W
T
he problem with NB-IoT is it is
limited; data rates top-out at
200 kbps (downlink) and payloads peak at 1600 bytes per
message. And if you want 10 years of
battery, you can’t go higher than 200
bytes per day. Which presents challenges for network transmission and power
consumption.
As such, the discipline for IoT is to
run processing at the ‘edge’, where the
action is. For low-power IoT, the only
option is to embed compute in the
module, as miniaturised ML, or ‘tinyML’.
This way, the process of ‘inferencing’
insights on cloud-trained ML models
happens in the device, and much of the
two-way traffic to the cloud is stopped.
Only the anomalies – the events driving
the action – are sent over the air, to enable centralised control of devices, and
further train the ML engine.
Meanwhile, the network is unburdened, helping to manage airtime
costs and conserve battery. The tinyML
movement is gathering pace; Nordic is working with US based tinyML
specialist Edge Impulse to embed ML
into its IoT portfolio, including into its
Bluetooth-based nRF52/3 series and
cellular-based nRF9160 (see pic)
products.
ater metering is the archetypal NB-IoT app, behind
a number of deployments
in China. In Europe, Vodafone has signed a 10-year water metering deal with UK-based SES Water
to install NB-IoT sensors into a smart
water distribution network with a view
to cut leakage by 15 percent over five
years and by more than half by 2045.
The project covers parts of Surrey, Kent,
West Sussex, and London. No figures
have been given for the number of meters to be connected to NB-IoT, but SES
Water manages water supply to around
300,000 homes.
The pair are installing digital meters,
sensors, and acoustic loggers on underground mains water pipes, to connect
over Vodafone’s NB-IoT network. The
acoustic loggers ‘listen’ for escaping water in the distribution network to determine when and where leaks occur. Data
is collected and transmitted across the
system; SES Water is alerted in the event
of any leaks, low pressure, or other network abnormalities.
Meters readings provide insight into
customer demand patterns, also, enabling SES Water to help customers to
better manage their own water usage,
reduce bills, and troubleshoot leaks
before they cause damage. Vodafone
is working in the same way with South
East Water and United Utilities in the UK
to detect leaks in underground pipes
and other infrastructure. It is estimated three billion litres of water is lost to
leaks everyday in the UK, equivalent
to 1,268 Olympic swimming pools,
the company said.
25
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
countries. Skipper makes an interesting response to a jumbled question about how a
vendor market trying to break-in new technology perceives ROI, and whether, in the
end, Vodafone’s €12.99 deal for 10 years of
NB-IoT airtime comes from a realisation that
low-power IoT needs to be sold in the early
days almost like a loss-leader.
He explains: “You can see where we’ve
come from; we’ve said, ‘Right, €1.29 per year
is the entry point, where it makes sense for
us and it makes sense for customers. You
have to think about the enabling price –
€12.99 over 10 years. Because all of these
myriad IoT applications only work if they get
started, and we think the get-started price is
€1.29 per year. The value [for the customer]
is in what they do with it.
“The value for us is to take a smaller slice of
a larger number of devices. But you have to
enable that large volume of devices to enter
the market. And the price is about right now,
for the modules and the connectivity. We are
heading down into the bottom of the pyramid, and to serve that segment you have to
make sure you connect at a price point that
supports the customer’s business case – almost rather than ours. Because then they
can scale.”
The €12.99 prepay plans, called IoT Easy
Connect, cover LTE-M and 2G, as well as NBIoT, in most countries in Europe, and allow
for 750MB of data and 250 SMS messages
over the 10-year life of the contract. They
are available online, and are geared more
towards IoT developers, and hobbyists; larger-scale airtime contracts are negotiated
individually, flexing four ways effectively
between traffic volumes, power usage, connection volumes, and price.
Skipper says: “If someone turned up on
the doorstep and wanted to buy five million,
then we‘d have a different conversation.
But the basic mechanism is in place. That
is the trick. It is not just about how much
you charge, but the flexibility to charge any
way the customer wants – prepayment,
post-payment, or rolled into the hardware…
But with IoT, there has always been a limit to
how low you go, and this opens up a new
part of the market.”
26
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#7 | CROSSOVER STANDARDS
T
he point that the cellular industry
missed the chance to distinguish
NB-IoT and LTE-M in the early
days, dampening the potential
change-impact of the former by conflating it with the latter, seems profound.
The notion gathers more meaning with
the development of the standards, and
particularly with the slow introduction of
Cat-NB2, the second-generation version
of NB-IoT (Cat-NB1), which brings certain
low-power advances, most notably better
mobility. The jeopardy is the blurring with
LTE-M becomes a technical reality, and not
just a strategic fudge.
NB2, standardized in 3GPP Release 14,
introduces NB-IoT cell roaming (handover)
when devices are connected, as well as
when they are idle. It also supports higher
data rates (127 / 159 kbps for the downlink / uplink, compared with closer 26 /
62 kbps with NB1), enhanced positioning
with observed time-of-arrival (OTDOA)
and cell-identity (E-CID), plus multi-carrier mode, multicast transmissions, and
new frequency bands. In theory, the new
capabilities will drive new use cases, but
the question about how to communicate
the value of twin technologies arises once
again.
The question goes to everyone: to operators considering whether to deploy
NB-IoT adjacent to LTE-M (and vice versa),
and how to differentiate their associated
commercial offers; to hardware makers
and solution developers asking whether
to stick-or-twist on single / dual-mode
solutions, and how to eke-out more efficient products; and to enterprises struggling already in an overly-fragmented
market. The conundrum is well captured
by Svein-Egil Nielsen, the outspoken tech
chief at Nordic Semiconductor. “Same shit,
different wrapping,” he says.
“You know, there is something in that.
Increasingly, operators are choosing to
deploy both technologies in the same
markets – because they somehow serve
slightly different use cases, and because
they don’t really understand the market
either, and because they don’t want to
miss any opportunities. But I still think you
can solve some of the same problems with
both technologies. We see more dual opportunities, even in these markets where
they are deploying both technologies.”
Dual-mode – the Monarch cellular IoT platform covers the bases, whether geographical, or technical
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
nRF9160
cellular IoT System-in-Package
Most compact, complete and energy-efficient
cellular IoT solution on the market
Tailored for
logistics and
asset tracking
Certified for global operation
Integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and GPS
SIM and eSIM support Dedicated application processor and memory
64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33
Arm TrustZone
CryptoCell
START DEVELOPING TODAY
nordicsemi.com/nRF9160
27
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#8 | ELECTRIC METERS, SAUDI
Zain + Saudi Electric
Company (2020/21)
Q
AFTERWORD
L
et us consider, again, this issue of
billing. Because it seems like airtime
costs, and not hardware costs, are
the biggest philosophical barrier
for the cellular market to get a handle on
massive IoT. Hardware fees will go down as
shipment volumes go up, invariably, as the
China story has demonstrated. The technical barriers of roaming and interoperability
are being dealt with, albeit more slowly
than expected, and in sometimes interminable fashion.
But billing is the gateway function for NBIoT connections to multiply, even as technical functionality is still being put right.
Billing remains the blocker for the cellular
industry to drive new IoT traffic, and build
new IoT applications, whether attached to
parochial installations or international deployments. In the end, multi-market business will be simpler when the technical hurdles go away, but nothing will get written at
all if the price is not right to begin with.
And the good news is the picture for
NB-IoT airtime billing looks far clearer than
a year ago, and even six months ago. Even
28
Nordic Semiconductor, producing the kind
of top-end dual-mode IoT units that preclude it from rubbing up against the bottom feeders in the Chinese market, is happy enough with the state of ‘things’, in late
2021, going into 2022. “The carriers could
have done better. But their pricing models
are starting to make sense; that is for sure.”
But Svein-Egil Nielsen, the company’s
chief technology officer, also wants to move
the conversation on, as well. Blame is a losing game, he suggests, which only seeks
to grapples with the past when the future
is obscure. Working with BICS-style MVNOs
iBASIS and Arkessa on airtime, and taking its
cues from the developer community at the
coal face of IoT, Nielsen wants to talk instead
about the total cost of ownership (TCO) (see
NB-IoT Challenge #3).
“We discuss TCO for the 10 year life of the
solutions, to include cellular IoT airtime and
certification, and all the services on top.
That is important, and takes the focus away
from the hardware – and reveals, actually,
that the hardware is the least of the problems. Because better hardware functionality
uite possibly the biggest NBIoT deal of them; the Saudi
Electricity Company (SEC)
claims to have installed 10
million smart electricity meters in 12
months. How many of these are NBIoT connected remains unclear; Spanish smart energy devices maker ZIV,
owned by Saudi outfit Alfanar, says it
has supplied 550,000 to the cause, offering dual-mode power-line (PLC) and
NB-IoT connectivity. Whether or not it is
the same deal, ABI Research suggested
the Saudi government has legislated to
bring 10 million NB-IoT based electric
smart meters online in due course.
“The Saudi government has plans
to use NB-IoT for electric meters as
well – which will see about 10 million
endpoints come online in the next few
years,” said Adarsh Krishnan, research
director at the firm. The ZIV design features a “sealed holster designed to also
host a pluggable LTE Cat-1 module, it
said. SEC launched its digital change
project in late 2019, with smart metering at the heart of it. The new system
automates the reading and billing process, allowing customers to interrogate
and manage their energy consumption
in “almost real time”. Of note, the 10-million swap-out of analogue meters was
carried out through the height of the
Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020/21.
Zain’s involvement is unconfirmed;
but it is the chief NB-IoT operator in
the kingdom, and has been active with
Nokia for some years to roll out NB-IoT.
It is included in the header just for
the sake of consistently – to keep
with the operator-led format.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#8 | HARDWARE CERTIFICATIONS
A
nything to add? The question
goes to Svein-Egil Nielsen, at the
end of our conversation (pages
10-13). Yes, it turns out; Nielsen
has a beef about hardware certifications,
as the last (maybe) roadblock for massive
IoT. “One of the things is this problem of
scale, [and the task] to build solutions that
are easy, and the biggest obstacle to that
is the carriers. They treat every IoT device
like a mobile phone, and run it through the
ringer with these extremely complicated
certification processes,” he says.
“They have not delivered on their promise to make cellular IoT an easy solution to
deploy. Some carriers want to test everything. Which is absurd because we are running the same checks [with everyone else].
“The carriers have not
made it easy. They want
to test everything –
which is absurd because
we are running the same
checks [with everyone]. There
is no end to it.”
You change the firmware, and you have to
go back to run millions of tests that you’ve
already done elsewhere. There is no end to
it. They come from a world where a handful
of phones are introduced each year. They
have big labs full of guys in white frocks; it
is like they have to justify their jobs.”
He goes on: “They have come a long
way with roaming
and billing, but
those are historical
issues. The problem
with certification is
still not solved. It is way
too cumbersome for us as a
company. They have not simplified
the process for IoT products; it is not fast
enough. The Global Certification Forum
(GCF) should have taken care of this – to
say, if you pass here, then you pass everywhere. Some carriers are happy with that
approach, but a whole pack of them insist
on doing things their own way. It makes no
sense.”
We’re glad we asked; is there anything else to add? Yes, actually...
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#9 | PATENT LICENSES
S
o, what else? Patent licensing is
troublesome, too, says Nielsen
at Nordic – another legacy of the
old world, turning each year on a
...
handful of bigger-ticket devices, that does
not transfer easily to the new one, where
an unknowable range of different devices will be connected for an unknowable
range of applications. “That is the last thing
that is holding this back,” he says.
While licensing of cellular standard essential patents (SEPs) is well established for
phones and base stations, the industry is still working out how
to charge for usage of these
technologies in various different IoT applications,
including cars, domestic appliances, industrial robots, and remote
“There isn’t an easy way to
do it – a single place to go.
We don’t mind where you
go, so long as you can go
somewhere. Because the
whole process takes a lot of
time.”
meters. In particular, litigation has bogged
down SEP licensing in vehicles, with disputes about where in the supply chain
licensing should occur – from chip,
to module, to telematic control unit (TCU), to the vehicle,
itself.
The confusion has delayed
payments of fair, reasonable,
and non-discriminatory (FRAND)
royalty charges in many cases; the massive
IoT movement has been grossly impeded,
says Nielsen. “To apply an LTE standard, you
have to pay some patent fees to someone
– and in the mobile space that is invariably
Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and a few others. They send an invoice, and you have to
pay – and it has been that way for 20 years,”
he says. But the IoT sector is disjointed and
complex, and the same methodology does
not work.
A similar solution to the certification
problem (above) is required, where a universal fee can be applied and the minutiae
of SEP management is simplified. “There
isn’t an established system to do it in an
easy way – a single place to go. We don’t
mind where you go, so long as you can
go somewhere. Because the whole
process, as it is, takes a lot of time.”
29
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#9 | ELECTRIC METERS, SWEDEN
Telia + Ellevio (‘20)
T
Metering – Saudi firm Alfanar is providing dual-mode NB-IoT and PLC electric meters for Saudi Electric Company (see right)
reduces the on-air traffic, for instance, and
affords a way to better manage the TCO,” he
says.
On this last point, Nordic Semiconductor
has a developing line in miniaturised machine learning (tinyML) to embed analytics
in power-constrained IoT modules (see NBIoT Challenge #6). The long-and-short of it,
literally, is more inferencing can be done at
the edge, on the device itself, and less in the
cloud – so the twin burdens on the transmission network and device battery are
reduced (although there is a power tradeoff
with the onboard processing, as well).
PLAYING CATCHUP
But talk about TCO is the same conversation
the non-cellular brigade, pushing LoRaWAN
and Sigfox (and other technologies), has
been having with enterprises for 12 months,
at least. The logic, very clearly, says enterprises do not want to discuss, or even know,
the individual price of hardware, airtime,
applications, and everything else that goes
into the IoT stack; they just want to know
how to drive efficiency and business.
It has just taken the mobile operators,
used to the two-stage sale of handsets and
30
airtime, longer to see the business of digital
change from the other side. Again, Vodafone, of tier-one operators, appears like it is
leading the negotiation “For us, NB-IoT and
LTE-M and 4G and 5G, plus satellite – that is
the whole connectivity stack. We are trying
to make it as easy as possible for customers
to connect in the most appropriate way for
their applications.”
Phil Skipper, the director of IoT strategy
and development, says NB-IoT has never
played second (or third, or fourth) fiddle
at Vodafone – to the point it has been
drowned out by all the 5G-noise, as others
in these pages have suggested. “The right
tool for the right job,” is how the UK business
describes NB-IoT, recently doubling its NBIoT cell coverage to cover 98 percent of the
UK geography.
Skipper says: “My department only does
IoT; we are looking only at what IoT customers want to buy from us. Which is why we
have this balance between 5G and NB-IoT,
and everything else – they are all valuable
assets, and we will use them all. People
think you have to have NB-IoT or LTE-M or
5G – like it is or-or-or. For us, the aim of the
game is to complete the set, and we are
elia has a headline deal with system integrator ONE Nordic to
connect approximately 900,000
electricity meters for electricity distributor Ellevio, which supplies
power to 35 municipalities in Sweden.
Telia was the first in the Nordic region to
launch NB-IoT, in late 2017; the 10-year
deal is its largest NB-IoT contract “to
date”. Rollout started early last year, and
will run through 2023. Ellevio has noted the “broader and deeper coverage”
afforded by NB-IoT – “ideal for rural and
deep indoor locations,” it says.
But for Telia, which worked with
country-mate Ericsson on its NB-IoT network, the new contract is only a part of
the metering puzzle in Sweden. It is also
working with integrators Sagemcom
and Landis+Gyr on deals to supply utilities E.ON and Kraftringen in Sweden.
Ericsson says it is “converting and managing” more than two million of the 5.4
million electric meters in Sweden with
cellular. The Kraftringen deal is for “more
than” one million, says Ericsson; the deal
with E.ON should take Telia well beyond
two million meters in Sweden.
Ericsson’s review of Telia’s work with
NB-IoT in the utilities space is a good
read. It says: “Telia was able to show the
TCO has become less than PLC and RF
Mesh for last mile connectivity... It is rare
in any industry to see the pace of adoption currently underway. Just two years
ago, meter vendors were not building
products designed for massive IoT. Normally, a revolution like this takes five to
10 years. Now, demand is outpacing
supply and vendors are racing to
make smart meters a part of the
smart grid.”
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
“We have this balance between
5G and NB-IoT, and everything
else – they are all valuable
assets. People think you have
to have NB-IoT or LTE-M or 5G
– like it is or-or-or. The aim is to
complete the set, and we are
now rolling out LTE-M as well.”
Phil Skipper, Group Head of IoT
Strategy and Business Development,
Vodafone Business
now rolling out LTE-M as well.”
The fact 2G is being retired (‘sunset’/’sunsetted’; see page 8) in global markets – the
US is already pulling the shutters down;
Europe is working generally towards a 2025
deadline; Asia Pacific is a couple of years
behind – (and 3G is defunct in many countries, already) will make the old M2M market
more discerning. Necessarily so, says Skipper, because IoT, running the gamut from
low-power NB-IoT to high-fidelity 5G, makes
exacting demands of network performance.
“When we only had 2G, everything was
on 2G. For IoT, the gap to 5G between what
you get and what you need – and what it
costs and what you can afford –is massive.
The gap with 4G is big, too; with 2G, it is not
LIFETIME VALUE
So the negotiation with enterprises is more
sympathetic, and the market dynamics are
turning the right way. Maybe the carriers
timed it right all along; maybe it is just that
their excuses, at least when articulated by
Vodafone, are well argued. It is interesting,
on the billing issue to run the maths on the
back of an envelope; a tally of hardware and
airtime fees quoted in these pages, plus
something for the service, gets us close to
Nielsen’s estimated TCO for cellular IoT.
“Working with our airtime partners, and
talking with enterprises, we think you can
get to $40-$50 over a 10 year lifetime for
the TCO on a cellular IoT solution,” he says.
Which seems to be where we are on NB-IoT
pricing; the calculation shakes out like so:
Covered – Vodafone says the rise of NB-IoT and
LTE-M, and the fall at the same time of 2G and 3G
in the next years, will leave the IoT space better
served; these twin low-power made-for-IoT
technologies will drive low-cost monitoring and
tracking solutions, while 4G-LTE and 5G-NR will
bring higher grade performance for powerful
broadband and critical enterprise services.
Cellular LPWA
(NB-IoT)
Cellular
NR (5G)
LOW
PERFORMANCE
HIGH
IoT access tech – the
complete set
so huge. But when 2G disappears, we will
have NB-IoT and LTE-M, and 4G and 5G. We
will be left with this new strata of connectivity, which better reflects the full range of
contemporary enterprise use cases,” he says.
“Because you have to make sure what
you’re offering really fits the application
– that you’re not sticking shots into pint
glasses. It’s more horses and more courses.
Which is why we look at this, and see cellular
IoT growing fast. You’d be surprised; our existing NB-IoT portfolio is pretty big to start
with, but we are also seeing it move into
new spaces.”
1
LOCAL-AREA
2
WIDE-AREA / DEEP
COVERAGE
Cellular
LTE (4G)
1
Non-cell, local-area
(Wi-Fi, BLE, Zigbee)
Cellular LPWA
(LTE-M)
2
Non-cellular LPWA
(Sigfox, LoRa)
Source: Ericsson
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#10 | AIRTIME MANAGEMENT
T
he last (!) challenge for cellular IoT, so far as Sequans is
concerned, is at the app-level,
riding above the hardware and
connectivity. The France-based firm is
producing dual-mode LTE-M and NBIoT chips; it says operators missed the
chance to distinguish between these
technologies by selecting one or the
other for deployment. Even as operators have started “doubling-down” lately on both, they are better served, says
Sequans, with dual-mode hardware.
Ideally, they should be able to switch
between LTE-M and NB-IoT remotely,
as well, suggests Jeremy Gosteau, in
charge of IoT marketing at the firm. But
there is a problem, as discussed (#5), remote SIM provisioning (RSP) using cellular IoT based eSIM / iSIM technology
remains in development. The process
currently requires a ‘bootstrap’ companion, typically 2G, to provision the unit in
the first place, and remotely switching
radio tech mid-stream is problematic.
Nevertheless, the game for hardware providers is to come up with the
software tools to enable visibility and
control of the carrier technology for developers and enterprises. “The goal is to
get something that makes it transparent for customers to use either of them
– so the investment to use LTE-M or NBIoT is zero. They will just have their own
application, to deploy on either technology, depending on where they want
to deploy. It remains a challenge for the
wider industry to make iSIM for NB-IoT a
reality. But it falls to the hardware makers to bring transparency about the use
of LTE-M or NB-IoT – to accelerate adoption of the technology.”
He adds: “That is pretty much it in
terms of challenges for cellular
IoT.”
31
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
$5-$10 (to be safe) for hardware (says Sequans) plus $15-odd (converted to dollars)
for airtime (says Vodafone), plus fees for
service analytics and management – equals
something like $50 for the life of an NB-IoT
product (says Nordic Semiconductor).
MASSIVE ALREADY?
Fifty bucks, 10 years, all-in; surely, that is
‘massive IoT’ written right there? Surely
you could put a tracker on most things for
that? “Yes; that’s the exciting part,” responds
Nielsen. “Because the principle works that
customers will pay $10 per year to track
sheep, or dogs, or cars, or whatever. There is
no problem justifying those kinds of costs.”
So why the delay? Why the finger pointing?
Why all the fuss?
Skipper rejoins: “That is the question:
why the fuss? Because everyone talks about
ARPU, and all the rest of it – but we are in
a different space now, trying to match the
way we sell to the way customers want to
buy – which is the way our customers sell to
their customers. It is a different view.” Note,
the use of first-person plural; is he speaking
for the rest of the market, too? Are AT&T and
Deutsche Telekom broadly in line? Is massive IoT about to come crashing?
“Well, it’s not necessarily crashing, but it
is aligning. This growth in roaming agreements is really the key to it.” Roaming always
gets the credit, and roaming cracks the ‘scale
barrier’; but the issues with interoperability,
even between networking gear in single
markets, and billing, and the attendant shift
in understanding, have been more primal.
Really, NB-IoT has only really worked at all
until now because of the foresight of the
likes of BICS (and 1NCE, Arkessa, iBASIS, and
a few others).
And really, billing, the last of these, is the
only thing to have been completely sorted.
So what’s the fuss? Do we really think ‘massive IoT’ is so easy, so suddenly? Of course
we don’t. Because roaming, actually, is not
finished, and interoperability remains. The
philosophy might be sound, and a breakthrough in negotiations even, but the
same gnarly technical issues abound – for
a while longer, yet.
32
KEY NB-IOT DEPLOYMENTS –
#10 | ASSET TRACKING, GERMANY
Vodafone + Bayer (2020/21)
T
he big one, in ways – until the next
one, of course; this deal between
pharmaceutical firm Bayer and
Vodafone is the first to exploit integrated SIM (iSIM) functionality, as well as
some inter-market roaming. The working
arrangement – also with Arm sister-company Kigen, chip manufacturer Altair Semiconductor (Sony) and module maker Murata – focuses on a printable NB-IoT based
tracking label, priced at a couple of euros,
for monitoring Bayer’s products through
the supply chain.
The smart label uses a proprietary
version of iSIM, as a layout on printable
silicon, along with a printable battery,
microprocessor, antenna, modem, plus a
couple of sensors. Vodafone provided the
reference, Arm issued the blueprint, Altair
designed the chip, and Murata designed
the module. Bayer, which retains the IP
rights and corralled the parties together,
prints the tracker, like any other stick-on
label, and slaps it on everything that goes
out of its warehouses. The label connects
to the cellular network when it is torn or
cut on opening.
The new solution can be configured for
LTE-M, or even straight cellular; NB-IoT has
been pre-selected in the Bayer design to
reduce power consumption and extend
battery life, which is put at 18-24 months,.
Vodafone has a ‘bootstrap’ deal with Kigen to provide the initial connectivity on
iSIM-based IoT devices, as well as fallback
in case of outages. The unit’s reporting
schedule has been optimised to conserve
power. After tearing and provisioning, the
label reports periodically – “once per day
to tell you it’s around, and to report events
after that”. The rota is kept to daily transmissions until the product moves out of
Label – innovative, cheap, and (possibly?) green
storage, and onto the road, where cellular
positioning provides a fix on the cargo. An
accelerometer and temperature sensor are
engaged, also, in case the goods are damaged in transit, and to trigger a response in
distribution.
Reporting slows, again, on arrival, in storage at the other end. Usefully, an alert is
issued when the package is opened, and
the seal is broken, for a second time. This
indicates the product has been put to use,
and provides Bayer with additional data for
inventory management and production
scheduling. Bayer is using the label for tracking distribution of its agricultural products,
notably chemical compounds or seed packs,
initially.
The label is green(ish), as well. The battery
is alkaline, rather than lithium-based, and so
“dissolvable”; the same for the other printed components, bar the chip, which can be
easily retrieved. The group are also looking into using biodegradable plastics,
made from fish scales, for the substrate.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
KEY NB-IOT CHALLENGES –
#11 | COMPETITOR ECOSYSTEM
‘NB-IoT could be stopped anytime’ –
the cries from the opposite corner
A
nother round; one for the road?
Why not? None of the other entries
in this list mention the competitor
landscape, which is noisy and wild,
and quite ready to say the cellular industry
has messed up with NB-IoT. Because, on one
hand, the cellular IoT stats are starting to look
decent: 175 operators have launched NBIoT (120) or LTE-M (55) networks so far, says
GSA; 518 devices support one or the other,
or both, including 432 NB-IoT Cat-NB-1 (362)
and Cat-NB2 (71) devices, and 371 LTE-M
(Cat-M) units.
But on the other, a part of the crowd remains unmoved; their non-cellular tech is
better in just about every way, they whoop
and holler. Plus, they brandish exhibit A in
the take-down; that NTT in Japan and DISH
in the US have both bailed on NB-IoT. It is a
sure sign that NB-IoT is doomed, they protest. Singapore-based IoT operator and development house UnaBiz is one of the more
vocal protagonists in this sporting play, both
in the stands and down in the dugout. Sigfox
has its problems, it observes, but it is the best
technology out of them all, remarks Henri
Bong, the company’s founder and chief.
“Sigfox has work to do to open the technology up, and find new ways to do business.
But I can tell you we have designed with Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT, and LTE-M, and in terms of
technology and TCO (total cost of ownership)
– the most important thing for the customer – Sigfox is the lowest. It is the lowest as
well in terms of energy consumption and
natural autonomy; it is by far the most optimized, because the sensor doesn’t connect
[before transmitting] – it sends the message
without asking. The Sigfox protocol has been
“Sigfox is better optimized
and more affordable, but
there will be cases that need
more bandwidth and security,
and will naturally migrate to
cellular – to LTE-M and NBIo, if NB-IoT still exists. And I
strongly believe NB-IoT could
be stopped anytime soon.”
Henri Bong,
Co-Founder and Chief Executive,
UnaBiz
designed to be very efficient in terms of TCO.”
BEST SOLUTION
But is that enough? Besides the tech, is Sigfox
a better solution? Bong responds, and twists
the knife on NB-IoT: “I’m not really saying
that. It is better optimized and more affordable, but there will be cases that need more
bandwidth and security, which will naturally
migrate towards cellular, and onto LTE-M and
NB-IoT – if NB-IoT still exists. And I strongly
believe NB-IoT could be stopped anytime
soon. But, yes, people will go to LTE-M if they
want more bandwidth.” It is the kind of thing
that gets said a lot in the (new) Wild West of
wide-area IoT.
But Bong has earned the right to be heard;
he knows the market, and the challenges
33
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
in the telecoms market subscribe to; that
LoRaWAN and Sigfox, whatever their claims,
have been required to build infrastructure
from scratch, and are way short of global
coverage – in every corner of every market.
and opportunities for each side. UnaBiz, established as a regional Sigfox operator, has a
couple of supply contracts at the top-end of
the current IoT scale; most notably, it worked
with NICIGAS in Japan on a deal for 850,000
gas meters. Another, with Australian keg
rental provider Konvoy, via local Sigfox operators Thinxtra, is worth around 20,000 connections, and set to scale larger. But its ambition is bigger; it has $25 million in its pocket,
from a recent Series B round, to go with the
$10 million it raised from KDDI and others in
2018, and wants to establish itself as a production house for the broader low-power
wide-area (LPWA) market.
DEVELOPER ECOSYSTEM
The theory is interesting; the one thing the
non-cellular LPWA brigade has in its favour is
its noisy dynamism. A LoRaWAN shindig, for
instance – all close collaboration, can-do optimism, coffee breath – strikes a very different tone to the well-heeled glamour shows
put on by the telecoms set. Most of the mobile industry’s troubles – network roaming,
technical interoperability, enterprise value,
co-creation – have been grappled with at
these sessions for years, and most of the major IoT innovations around efficiency and value have come from their delegates.
This is the faceoff, ultimately, for all the
coaches and fans in the NB-IoT end. The
strength of the opposition is in its number,
variety, flexibility, and initiative. Bong wants
to bottle this scattered dynamism into a single brew, and issue it to his team in the break
in order to unify and fortify its combative
constituents against the slow-moving old
galacticos across the way. “The problem is
Sigfox and LoRa are fighting for nothing –
for a pie that is getting smaller [in percentage terms] everyday, because of the cellular
world,” he explains.
“And suddenly these two camps have realized what is in front of them – all the cellular
world, all of these giants of the industry, lined
up against them, just a bunch of small disruptors promoting ultra low-cost IoT. So we
hope – I hope – for some synergies. Because
I can see them.” But we should consider the
opposite view, which most commentators
34
DEVELOPER ECOSYSTEM
Vision – UnaBiz chief Bong has presided over large-scale
Sigfox deals with NICIGAS in Japan (below) and keg rental
company Konvoy in Australia (bottom), and wants to
unite the non-cellular side against the NB-IoT brigade
Even their large-scale successes, hovering
around the million-mark, are parochial affairs, compared to the kind of multi-market
massive IoT contracts mobile operators are
supposed to be lining up. What about NTT
and DISH; were their decisions in 2020 to
shut-down their NB-IoT networks and writeoff their NB-IoT investments just freak strategic reversals? Or is there something in the
air? Adarsh Krishnan at ABI Research says not
to put much store in them.
He comments: “They were just business
decisions – NB-IoT wasn’t doing much for
NTT, and DISH wanted to focus on its 5G
portfolio. But that is all. We haven’t seen it
anywhere else; what we have seen, instead, is
this emphasis on LTE-M as a longer-term play
for enterprises to migrate away from 2G and
3G, and on NB-IoT as this massive IoT technology for all kinds of new use cases. That
is really what we are seeing at the moment,
even if there are a few stumbling blocks still.”
What about the buzzy threat down the
flanks from these jinky LoRaWAN and Sigfox
wingers? Have the mobile operators left the
‘gate’ open, while they do up their shoelaces
and pick fluff from their belly buttons? Is an
upset on the cards? “No, no,” responds Jeremy
Gosteau, from Sequans, rejoining the conversation to shut it down at last. “That won’t
happen. We see customers who started with
LoRa and Sigfox because they thought they
would deliver; but many of these IoT applications require large geographical footprints,
and so they have felt deceived.”
He adds: “They are good technologies, no
question. But they are really more suited to
small areas, for campus installations and factory use cases – for a bunch of buildings, yes,
but not for national and international projects. So there is no back door for non-cellular
technology. And I don’t think the delay has
really benefited them.” Powerful stuff, albeit
from a partisan crowd.
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
ABOUT THE SPONSOR
BICS is a global communications provider enabling international connectivity and
mobility for people, applications, and things.
Nordic Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Trondheim,
Norway. The company specializes in ultra-low power performance wireless system on a
chip and connectivity devices for the 2.4 GHz ISM band, with power consumption and
cost being the main focus areas.
Sequans is a leading developer and provider of 5G and 4G chips and modules for massive,
broadband, and critical IoT. For 5G/4G massive IoT applications, Sequans provides a
comprehensive product portfolio based on its Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT and Calliope Cat 1
chip platforms, featuring industry leading low power consumption and global deployment
capability. For 5G/4G broadband and critical IoT applications, Sequans offers a product
portfolio based on its Cassiopeia Cat 4/Cat 6 4G and high-end Taurus 5G chip platforms,
optimized for low-cost residential, enterprise, and industrial applications.
35
2 0 2 1 E D I TO R I A L C A L E N DA R
O C TO B E R 2 0 2 1
Enterprise IoT Insights |
Talking About Industrial Revolution | Conversations with
industry about IoT in commercial real estate (CRE)
RCR Wireless |
Need guaranteed leads?
Thought leadership? Incremental content?
Marketing opportunities?
Sponsor an RCR Wireless / Enterprise IoT Insights multi-platform, editorial
program and receive the following benefits:
EDITORIAL WEBINAR – sponsorship includes 250 guaranteed leads, participation as sponsored guest, and recognition as sponsor in all promotional
materials. Sponsors will receive webinar registration and attendee list,
responses to pre / post surveys, responses to polls gathered during webinar.
EDITORIAL REPORT – in addition to recognition as sponsor in program promotion, sponsorship includes 250 guaranteed leads, distinct from webinar
leads, one-page ad spread or advertorial in feature report, and responses to
lead capture survey questions.
The challenges and opportunities of small cell network
densification
RCR Wireless |
Monetizing MEC: What’s the value in the edge?
RCR Wireless |
Zooming In: Achieving accurate indoor location
NOVEMBER 2021
RCR Wireless |
What will the delay of Release 17 mean for the 5G future?
NOVEMBER 9 | 5G Manufacturing Forum
RCR Wireless |
Creative destruction: How network disaggregation changes
everything
25% discount when you sponsor two or more programs.
RCR Wireless |
For information contact: sales@rcrwireless.com
Everything-as-a-service: Consumption models when the
cloud is everywhere.
Fast facts about RCR Wireless:
382,000 monthly page views
DECEMBER 2021
170,000 unique monthly visitors to websites
81,000+ opt in newsletter subscribers
Enterprise IoT Insights |
220,526 monthly video minutes
Digital Factory Solutions | The role of hyperscalers in
industrial 5G
45,000 leads generated annually
Industry leading demand generation programs and results
TALKING ABOUT (INDUSTRIAL) REVOLUTION
DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: INDUSTRIAL 5G
RCR Wireless |
The state of Wi-Fi 6
RCR Wireless |
STATE
‘THINGS’
in SMART
Is it really time to start talking about 6G?
M AY 2 0 2 1
The
of
MANUFACTURING
– how enterprises are grasping for
and grappling with industrial IoT
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
APRIL 2021
INDUSTRIAL
5G SLAs
– industrial 5G network performance,
and the new turf war over the supply
and management of 5G in Industry 4.0
by James Blackman
Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights
J A N UA RY 2 0 2 2
RCR Wireless / Enterprise IoT Insights |
The green credentials of 5G and IoT—can technology help
save the world?
Enterprise IoT Insights |
Hybrid LPWAN and IoT