GEC NEWS WIRENB-IoT LPWA Technology Standard Agreed By 3GPP; Pilots and Open Lab Testing Underway with Commercial Implementations Starting in 2016
The GSMA has asserted that the mobile industry has agreed on technology standards for the emerging Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) market and these standards have been accepted by 3GPP. Industry alignment over common standards for Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), Extended Coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS) and LTE Machine Type Communication (LTE-MTC) will enable operators and their ecosystem partners to capitalise on a market estimated to be worth US$589 billion by 2020 or approximately 47 per cent of the machine-to-machine (M2M) market, according to Machina Research¹.
The complementary technologies, which are set for 3GPP Release 13, are delivered through licensed spectrum and will cover all LPWA use cases, ensuring customer choice and helping the Internet of Things (IoT) market to flourish.
The GSMA’s ‘Mobile IoT Initiative, which is supported by 27 of the world’s leading mobile operators, OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies, is now working to accelerate the development of LPWA solutions and will implement multiple global pilots in early 2016 with full commercial solutions starting later in the year.
This is an important step in enabling operators to deliver industry standard solutions by extending their existing high-quality managed networks, service platforms and world-class customer management capabilities,” said Alex Sinclair, Acting Director General and Chief Technology Officer, GSMA. “
