The Internet of Things has entered the 2.0 stage: NB-IoT networks can basically achieve nationwide coverage this year

The Internet of Things is known as the next trillion-dollar market and has become a hot topic that the world is competing for. It is leading a technological and industrial revolution. From hardware products such as chips, sensors, and IoT base stations to complete IoT applications and services, whoever can master the core technology and have a perfect implementation solution will have unparalleled competitiveness.

Last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a document requiring that by 2020, the NB-IoT network will achieve universal coverage across the country, and achieve deep coverage in application scenarios such as indoors, transportation networks, and underground pipelines, with a base station scale of 1.5 million.

Currently, China Telecom's 310,000 NB-IoT base stations are still the world's largest record holder; China Unicom's NB-IoT base station scale will exceed 300,000 in May this year, basically achieving nationwide coverage; although China Mobile's pace is slow, it will also achieve continuous coverage of the NB-IoT network to all counties and cities across the country by the end of this year.

At yesterday's "2018 First Quarter Industrial Communications Industry Development Conference", Wen Ku, Director of the Information and Communications Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revealed that the three operators are expected to add another 300,000 NB-IoT base stations this year.

There has been little news about China Unicom's development of NB-IoT, but the recent news is louder and louder, and the pace is becoming clearer.

On March 16, 2018, China Unicom established Unicom Internet of Things Company in Nanjing with a registered capital of RMB 400 million. It is positioned as the entity for China Unicom's external business and capital cooperation and the platform for China Unicom's Internet of Things external cooperation.

In fact, China Unicom has completed the construction of the NB-IoT core network in the third quarter of last year. By May this year, the scale of NB-IoT base stations will exceed 300,000, basically covering the whole country. This will also be the second NB-IOT network covering the whole country after China Telecom.

In June last year, China Unicom launched a new generation of connection management platform for the Internet of Things. Currently, the platform has more than 80 million connections and nearly 20,000 industry customers, with about 3-4 million new connections added each month. It has become the world's largest single connection management platform. It is expected that by the end of this year, the number of China Unicom's Internet of Things connections will exceed 130 million.

At the same time, China Unicom uses the same platform with more than 50 operators around the world, which means that the terminals of the 50 operators can be managed through one platform.

In addition, China Unicom has adopted two methods to internationalize the Internet of Things. One is SIM cards. Last month, China Unicom opened up the European direction. In the future, SIM numbers can be directly written as the numbers of a local operator in Europe to enjoy local rates. The second is to do cross-platform docking with international operators.

China Telecom has always been the most active and effective in developing NB-IoT networks.

As early as last year, the deployment of the 800MHz-based NB-IoT network was completed, and 310,000 base stations across the network were upgraded synchronously, building the world's largest NB-IoT network.

Later, the world's first NB-IoT package was launched. The billing model of this package abandoned the extremely low-value traffic charging model in NB-IoT and charged based on the "number of connections". Among them: the annual package price is 20 yuan/household/year, and the life cycle package has 7 levels, namely 2 years/household 35 yuan, 3 years/household 50 yuan, 4 years/household 65 yuan, 5 years/household 80 yuan, 6 years/household 90 yuan, 7 years/household 100 yuan, and 8 years/household 105 yuan.

Moreover, it has long been announced that it will invest 300 million yuan in special funds for the Internet of Things to promote the maturity of the NB-IoT terminal industry chain, of which 200 million yuan will subsidize module products and 100 million yuan will subsidize 2/3/4G module products according to project needs, in order to promote the reduction of industry barriers and costs and enrich the terminal industry chain.

Especially in terms of implementation, China Telecom has greatly improved the reporting success rate of water, electricity, gas and other meter readings in smart cities through the linkage optimization of NB-IoT network and IoT platform, and reduced the low latency and other problems in the reporting process. Therefore, China Telecom has a large share in the water meter, electricity meter and gas meter market.

In June last year, China Mobile officially obtained a license to deploy cellular narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology on the 900MHz frequency band.

However, since the current NB-IoT standard can only support FDD mode, China Mobile did not have an FDD LTE license before, so it did not deploy NB-IoT networks on a large scale.

It was not until April 3, 2018 that China Mobile was issued an FDD license, which is extremely beneficial for the development of NB-IoT networks.

According to industry insiders, "Since China Mobile's network construction will most likely be based on the construction of new base stations, in sync with the LTE 900M low-frequency re-cultivation, the progress will not be as fast as China Telecom and China Unicom's direct deployment through base station upgrades."

In fact, China Mobile's NB-IoT has been launched in 346 cities in 2017, achieving end-to-end large-scale commercial use. It is expected that in 2018, China Mobile's NB-IoT network will continue to expand its coverage to counties and cities across the country.

Previously, China Mobile announced that it would provide 2 billion yuan in special subsidies for the construction of the Internet of Things in 2018, half of which would be used to support NB-IoT modules, providing manufacturers with a subsidy rate of 60%-80%, and the other half would be used to support 4G IoT modules, with a maximum subsidy of 50%. It also disclosed the NB-IoT tariff for the first time, including two annual packages of 20 yuan and 40 yuan.

Last year, China Mobile's "Cellular Internet of Things Project Wireless and Core Network Equipment Design and Feasibility Study Procurement" revealed that the relevant project amount was 39.5 billion yuan. It is understood that China Mobile expects the overall base station construction scale to exceed 400,000 in two years, with an overall investment of more than 40 billion yuan.

Source: Zhulong Electric, Qianjia.com

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