Deutsche Telekom and Huawei claim to have activated the world’s first Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) end-to-end system on the operator’s live network in Germany and are set to demo it next week.
Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO of Deutsche Telekom and Jiang Wangcheng, president of global IoT business at Huawei, together with T-Mobile Netherlands, will demonstrate the system, along with a commercial NB-IoT smart parking system, also described as a “first”.
The actual activation was on 4 October, the operator said. Next week’s demo will take place in Bonn, it added.
Deutsche Telekom’s Dutch unit has previously demonstrated a smart parking system.
Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technology NB-IoT runs on existing operator networks in licensed spectrum to support a massive number of IoT devices.
It is especially optimised for applications with low bandwidth requirements, such as smart parking, smart metering or smart waste management.
Back in June, Deutsche Telekom said it had been actively involved in the development of NB-IoT, realising the “world’s first” implementation of pre-standard NB-IoT on a commercial network in October 2015, also in Germany.
At the time it said it was making efforts within 3GPP and GSMA to promote global standardisation and had established a NB-IoT Prototyping Hub.
NB-IoT was only ratified as a 3GPP standard in June and faces competition from non-cellular LPWA technologies that are already deployed in unlicensed spectrum bands, such as Sigfox, RPMA and LoRa.
Last month, Vodafone appeared to be ahead of schedule in preparing for a commercial launch of LPWA IoT networks next year, announcing it had completed the “world’s first” trial of standardised NB-IoT on a live commercial network, also with Huawei.
By 2020, Vodafone aims to have all its LTE sites supporting NB-IoT technology.
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