The mobile industry has agreed on standards that will enable around 47 percent of the machine-to-machine market.
The standards, which address the Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) market, were accepted by 3GPP, the group of telecoms associations working towards generating globally applicable industry standards for networks.
Alignment on the common standards was reached over three specific areas: Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), Extended Coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS) and LTE Machine Type Communication (LTE-MTC).
Developed as part of the GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative, the new standards are delivered through licenses spectrum and cover all LPWA use cases.
The LPWA network is designed to allow long-range communications at a low data rate, from devices that require long battery life and need to be able to operator unattended for long periods of time.
This would for example cover sensors in remote locations operating on a battery, industrial asset tracking, safety monitoring, water and gas metering, vending machines, smart grids and city lighting.
It will also connect wearable devices.
The GSMA will launch global pilots in early 2016 with full commercial solutions starting later in the year. There will be a 3GPP meeting in Budapest from 18-22 January that will finalise the details of the agreed NB-IoT standards.
"IoT technology is highly fragmented at present so it is good to see such broad agreement on standards for the radio link," said Martin Garner, Chief of Research, CCS Insight.
"This will help to reduce costs and technical risks for companies adopting IoT solutions."
"Connections are one of the key parts of IoT, but there is still high technical fragmentation in other aspects such as protocols, cloud services, data and analytics. Improved standardisation in the radio link will definitely help but is not the only area where this effort is needed."
