41 mobile IoT networks now available worldwide, supported by IoT labs and growing mobile innovator community
The GSMA has announced that momentum behind Mobile Internet of Things (IoT), or licensed Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, continues to grow on a global basis. To date, 23 mobile operators have commercially launched 41 mobile IoT networks worldwide across both NB-IoT and LTE-M.
This growth is supported by 34 IoT Labs and an expanding community of over 800 organisations in the GSMA’s Mobile IoT Innovators Community. According to GSMA Intelligence forecasts, by 2025 there will be 3.1 billion cellular IoT connections, including 1.8 billion licensed LPWA connections.
“2018 is the year that mobile IoT networks will scale. We have seen huge growth in the availability of commercial networks in licensed spectrum and anticipate seeing many more launches this year. This is underpinned by an expanding community of organisations developing innovative new solutions and a number of IoT Labs helping companies to test out new products and services,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO, GSMA. “Mobile IoT networks are fast becoming the defacto global IoT solution, as only licensed, managed mobile services can provide the secure low power connection that can meet future demand.”
The GSMA also announced that there are now 34 IoT labs in operation around the world which are available to any operator, module vendor or application provider to develop LPWA devices and applications for a wide variety of different verticals. The labs provide organisations with the opportunity to perform end to end and interoperability testing on the network. AT&T became the latest operator to participate in the IoT Labs initiative, with the support of three AT&T Foundry locations in Atlanta, Georgia and Plano and Houston, Texas, and the AT&T Device Radio Lab (DRL) in Austin, Texas.
NB-IoT networks are available from 3 Hong Kong (Hong Kong); China Mobile (China, Hong Kong); China Telecom (China); China Unicom (China); Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan); Cosmote (Greece); Deutsche Telekom (Austria, Germany, Netherlands); Dialog (Sri Lanka); Etisalat (UAE); KT (South Korea); LGU+ (South Korea); M1 (Singapore); Mobitel (Sri Lanka); Orange (Belgium); Slovak Telecom (Slovakia); Telia (Finland, Norway); Telstra (Australia); TIM (Italy); T-Mobile (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Poland); Turkcell (Turkey); Velcom (Belarus) and Vodafone (Australia, Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Turkey).
LTE-M networks are available from AT&T (US, Mexico); Etisalat (UAE); KDDI (Japan); KPN (Netherlands); Orange (Belgium); Telstra (Australia); Turkcell (Turkey) and Verizon (US).
