Which Internet of Things strategies and network strategies are distributed by global operators?

Which Internet of Things strategies and network strategies are distributed by global operators?

After several years of preparation and development, the concept of IoT was quickly recognized worldwide and became one of the core driving forces of the new scientific and technological revolution and industrial revolution. According to statistics from Strategy Analytics, as of the end of 2017, nearly 20 billion IOT and networking devices will be deployed worldwide and 10 billion more devices will be deployed in the next four years. Chinese carriers that have already integrated Iot into their development strategies need to understand the global Iot deployment to optimize resource allocation and seize the opportunities of Iot.

 

Network deployment features

At present, the overall international IoT construction is characterized by the joint development of eMTC and NB-IoT. As of November 2017, 28 mobile Iot products had been commercially available worldwide. Five carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, have commercialized five LTE-M networks; carriers, including Vodafone, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, Korea Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom, have commercialized 23 NB-IoT networks.

As the first year of commercial NB-IoT in 2017, China Telecom and China Mobile successively completed the construction of the world's largest NB-IoT network. China Telecom proposed to build an intelligent connection ecosystem in the 13th five-year plan. At present, its Iot ecosystem has taken shape. In May 2017, China Telecom officially announced the establishment of the world's first NB-IoT commercial network after a series of tasks such as advance deployment, standard tracking, field testing, version release, and commercial deployment.

China Mobile proposed a "big connection" strategy. In 2017, the net increase of China Mobile's physical connection reached more than one person's and family connections, accounting for 61.8% of total net connections, becoming the first driving force for the growth of the connection scale. According to the plan, China Mobile achieved continuous coverage of NB-IoT in 2017 cities by the end of 346.

Such as AT&T, Verizon, KDDI, and NTT DoCoMo have successively carried out eMTC commercialization. As early as 2015, AT&T proposed a strategic vision of "connecting people's life, work, entertainment, and other aspects to the world and making connections the best. At the beginning of 2017, AT&T announced the launch of a nationwide LTE-M network and the launch of a LTE-M package plan, each device's monthly starting price as low as $1.5, the annual plan, the multi-year plan, and the additional device quantity plan will also receive larger discounts. Verizon announced its global Iot strategy in 2015. At the end of March 2017, Verizon launched its first nationwide commercial LTE-M network in the United States, covering an area of 2.4 million square kilometers. The package is set to a minimum of $2 per device per month, and provides customized options for batch activation and bulk purchase.

Actively explore business expansion

The popularity and maturity of Iot applications in different industries have promoted the development of Iot. Wearable devices, smart home appliances, self-driving cars, smart robots, etc. Tens of billions of new devices will be connected to the network. The rise of the Internet of Things will drive the intelligent upgrade of industries, the automobile industry, and urban construction. Global operators are actively exploring Iot business expansion.

China's three operators have collaborated with partners and achieved fruitful results in various vertical industry cooperation fields. In terms of transportation, China Mobile provides mobike with more accurate positioning and more convenient unlocking solutions based on cellular Iot. In terms of energy, it provides a quality network testing environment based on NB-IoT products for Hongkong gas.

In March 2017, the world's first NB-IoT-based smart Water Project was commercially available in Shenzhen, Guangdong. China Telecom, Shenzhen Water, and  jointly released the NB-IoT smart water meter White Paper. in June, China Telecom released an Iot platform in Shanghai to join global industrial partners to achieve global "product integration, channel interaction, and sharing of results". In July, in xiong'an new district, the NB-IoT-based smart city management application demonstration site is fully built and officially put into use.

For AT&T and Verizon, the IOT business is penetrating more and more fields, and industry and urban construction are the key points. In the automotive industry, AT&T has established partnerships with 20 of the world's top 24 automakers to provide users with a better driving experience and higher security; verizon acquired a leading GPS Vehicle Tracking company in North America. In the field of urban construction, AT&T has established a smart city life laboratory in Dallas, where its headquarters is located, using IoT technology to remotely control street lights, environmental sensors are used to measure different types of pollutants and temperature, air humidity, and atmospheric pressure. Verizon acquired a company that provides Smart LED lights, tens of thousands of LED sensor lamps are connected to a dense Iot grid through LTE eMTC, forming a full coverage of spatial geographic information for the entire urban core and traffic trunk.

Up to now, the world's five major operators have released the NB-IoT package. China Telecom is the first operator in the world to publish the NB-IoT business package. connection fee = Total number of NB-IoT connections in China Telecom × unit price of each NB-IoT connection, reflecting value from connection, we have abandoned the extremely low-value traffic charging model in NB-loT and set the precedent. China Mobile has launched an affordable annual package of 20 yuan and 40 yuan; china Unicom's NB-IoT package provides two usage methods: VPDN-oriented traffic and Internet traffic (I .e. general traffic); Deutsche Telekom launches two NB-IoT service packages: the simplified NB-IoT device connection package starts at 199 euros and contains 25 SIM cards activated in 6 months. Each SIM card has KB of traffic and a comprehensive NB-IoT product connection package, including Deutsche Telekom's CloudofThings platform, with a starting price of 299 euros. T-Mobile launched the first NB-IoT billing package in the United States, which is $6 a year, 10 single packets per hour (maximum rate of 64 kbps), the annual traffic ceiling is 12 MB.

The future is available

GSMA believes that by 2025 there will be 27 billion Iot connections, about 70% of which are short-distance connections. Specifically, the number of mobile connections to IOT in 2016 is 0.45 billion, which will reach 2025 by 5 billion. The number of cellular IOT (2G/3G/4G) connections will reach 2025 by 2 billion, and the number of LPWA connections will reach 2025 by 3 billion. By 2022, 56% of the active LPWA connections will adopt the authorization spectrum technology.

Telecom operators are expected to create an Iot revenue of up to $2025 in 190 billion. Compared with 2016, it will increase by nearly 20 times. Among these revenues, devices and connections only account for about 20%, platforms and applications account for 45% of revenue, and IOT consulting and management services account for about 35% of revenue. Mchina predicts that in 2025, the number of mobile Iot connections in major vertical industries accounted for 42% of connected vehicles, subsequently, they are interconnected energy 18%, interconnected industry 13%, Smart Home 8%, consumer electronics 6%, and smart medical 6%. China's operators are ready to win huge benefits from Iot by expanding the deployment scale of IOT and improving the level of Iot applications.

Unprecedented opportunities and challenges coexist

Security is increasingly becoming an unstable factor in the technical application process. With the rapid development of the Internet, Iot networks and devices of important institutions around the world are frequently attacked, and the "pain points" of Iot information security are frequently emerging. Juniper Research predicts that by 2019, the loss of data leakage around the world will reach $2.1 trillion, and Iot will account for a large part of the loss. It is imperative to improve the IOT security system.

Cost has become an important challenge for smart city projects. Machine Research predicts that the deployment of Iot solutions without interconnectivity standards will increase the cost of smart city projects around the world by $2025 by 341 billion. There is no standardized solution, the deployment cost of the global smart city project will reach $1.12 trillion, which can be reduced to $781 billion if standardized solutions are used. The establishment of general interoperability standards is urgently needed.

The development bottleneck and deep-seated problems of the Internet of Things market in China are still prominent. Core basic capabilities such as chips, sensors, and operating systems are still weak, and the R & D capabilities of high-end products are not strong. There is a large gap between the original innovation capability and developed countries. Insufficient industrial collaboration, it is manifested in the gap between the market and industry and between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. It lacks leading enterprises that integrate upstream and downstream resources and lead the coordinated development of the industry.