Since the birth of NB-IoT, its development trend has attracted the attention of many companies. Over the past two years, NB-IoT has definitely been one of the hottest topics in the Internet of Things. Both companies and professional research institutions are I have great expectations for the development of the NB-IoT industry. The topic of NB-IoT has returned to fire, but it hasn't really exploded yet. For enterprises that want to flex their muscles in the field of NB-IoT and even Internet of Things, it should be clear about the conceptual bubble and ideally analyze and judge it. NB-IoT industry development.

What are the characteristics of NB-IoT?

To analyze the future prospects of a new technology, a very important factor is to look at its technical characteristics can not meet the needs of the market, and in the competition with the same type of technology has its own unique advantages to achieve irreplaceable effect. At present, NB-IoT competitive products are mainly traditional 2G networks and future eMTC networks. Compared with 2G, NB-IoT is optimized in connection capacity and power consumption. Compared with eMTC, it is also in power consumption and coverage depth. There are advantages, especially in the context of 2G network exit, NB-IoT has unique advantages in low-rate networks. The main technical features of NB-IoT are:

Advantage 1: Mass Connection

Compared with traditional 2G/3G/4G, NB-IoT has 50 to 100 times more uplink capacity, and a single base station can support 50,000 users at 200 kHz. Therefore, compared with existing wireless technologies, NB-IoT can increase the number of accesses by 50 to 100 times. At the same time, it optimizes mass storage and access control and is suitable for mass access scenarios, such as smart street lights and smart trash cans. , smart cover, smart meter, smart meter, smart gas meter and so on.

Advantage two: Depth Coverage

NB-IoT wireless technology improves power spectrum density, NB-IoT improves 20dB gain over LTE, that is, coverage is increased by 100 times, and wide area coverage is well achieved even when signals in underground garages, basements, and underground pipelines are difficult to reach. Places can also be covered. This solves the problem that existing LTE wireless signals are difficult to cover, such as water meters, electricity meters, and gas meters deployed in buildings, underground garages, underground rooms, or underground pipelines.

Advantage three: Low Power Consumption

The NB-IoT power-saving technologies DRX (Discontinuous Reception) and PSM (Power Saving Mode) achieve the purpose of saving power by reducing unnecessary signaling and not receiving paging information when in the PSM state. Battery life over 5 years. This satisfies the key requirements for low power consumption and long standby of IoT devices, especially for scenarios where there is no continuous power supply or battery replacement, such as wild animal tracking, sensor equipment under harsh conditions, etc. The standby time of these devices usually requires more than 5 years.

Advantage four: Low Cost

The NB-IoT core network has added “Packet Data Control Plane Transport Optimization, Power Saving Optimization (PSM, eDRX)” to the traditional EPC core network. The signaling flow is simplified, message interaction is greatly reduced, and NB-IoT low mobility access is achieved. . The low speed and low complexity bring low cost and the NB-IoT chip can be made very small. The chip cost is often related to the chip size. The smaller the size, the lower the cost. The NB-IoT is optimized at the radio frequency, and the cost of the module becomes lower.

What problems can it solve?

NB-IoT is a wireless communication technology that is very suitable for the Internet of Things. In the application of the Internet of Things, there are several demands that need to be urgently resolved.

First of all, the number of links to the Internet of Things is tens of billions or more, while the traditional 2G/3G/4G/ is mainly aimed at people's connections and does not have such a large capacity; therefore, it needs wireless communication technology to do the bearing capacity. breakthrough.

Secondly, the data collected by the vast majority of terminals on the Internet of Things is relatively simple. For example, temperature, humidity, gas composition, and so on, this type of demand can be met with wireless communication technology with a relatively small bandwidth. As for the waste of bandwidth.

Finally, low-frequency data transmission on the Internet of Things requires relatively high power consumption, because for IoT projects, high power consumption means a significant increase in cost.

These needs of the Internet of Things can be well resolved through NB-IoT technology.

The attitude and layout of society at all levels

Policy Level

China attaches great importance to the development of the NB-IoT industry and has elevated it to the height of the national strategy. It has connected the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for two years to publish plans related to NB-IoT, and has implemented the Internet of Things as a feature industry in many provinces and cities. Strong support.

NB-IoT has a very friendly development environment in China. Under the instigation of upper-level policies, the development speed of NB-IoT industry will be much faster than normal.

Operator

The status of operators in the communications field is self-evident, and the three major operators in China are very positive about NB-IoT. In 2016, operators are still simply piloting and exploring in the NB-IoT space. Large operators have already had a substantial layout in NB-IoT. In addition to the large-scale distribution network, operators have announced their own subsidy plans in order to promote the rapid development of the entire industry.

Application Company

For a new person, judging whether it has real potential depends not only on the layout of the upstream companies, but also on the choice of application companies. In fact, even though the NB-IoT network is not yet mature, hundreds of companies have already researched and developed NB-IoT-related products. We can see from Huawei or Qualcomm's NB-IoT ecosystem. NB-IoT's early deployment of the company has covered industries, industries, smart cities, logistics and other industries. In addition to terminal hardware companies, software companies such as cloud platforms are also actively integrating NB-IoT into their own business scope. It can be said that the explosion of NB-IoT has already been awaited.