Huawei’s NB-IoT technology has won the gold medal for new technologies and products at the 2016 World Internet of Things Exposition (WIOT) in Wuxi, China.
Huawei says this makes it the first company to win a significant award in the narrowband cellular IoT field. “Huawei has conducted lab and field tests with a number of world’s top carriers, and the overall test results meet or even exceed the requirements stipulated by the 3GPP specifications,” Huawei said.
“The gold medal represents the fact that Huawei’s industry-leading NB-IoT solution has received high recognition from the IoT industry and also improves industry confidence in the rapid development of the NB-IoT industry chain.”
Huawei released its first NB-IOT product in September 2016, following finalisation of the standard in June. It was one of the co-founders of the NB-IoT forum, which has now grown to 41 members.
Huawei demonstrated its NB-IoT technology with Vodafone in Australia in April 2016 on the network of Melbourne’s South East Water utility, when Henk Koopermans, CEO of UK company, Neul, acquired by Huawei in 2014, told IoTAustralia that Neul had developed the technology underpinning the NB-IoT standard.
Meanwhile in June u-blox claimed to have developed the first NB-IoT module, designed for use in applications such as smart buildings and cities, utilities metering, white goods, asset tracking and agricultural and environmental monitoring. However it gave availability as “forthcoming”, but gave no date for availability.
Huawei says it and partners worldwide have established seven NB-IoT Open Labs, where smart parking, smart water and gas meter reading, smart street lamp, and other NB-IoT applications have been incubated and it has started deploying pilot NB-IoT sites with carriers around the world.
The GSMA has predicted there will be 20 commercial NB-IoT networks deployed by the end of 2017, saying “NB-IoT will become one of the dominant 3GPP technologies to enable [IoT] market growth and will impact most, if not all, companies and markets over the next 10 to 15 years.”
