The GSMA hailed new 3GPP standards for the emerging Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connections, a market forecast to grow to US$589 billion by 2020, or approximately 47 percent of the machine-to-machine (M2M) market, according to Machina Research.
The new standards, which will be part of 3GPP Release 13, include: Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), Extended Coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS) and LTE Machine Type Communication (LTE-MTC).
“This is an important step in enabling operators to deliver industry standard solutions by extending their existing high-quality managed networks, service platforms and world-class customer management capabilities,” said Alex Sinclair, Acting Director General and Chief Technology Officer, GSMA. “The Low Power Wide Area market is a high-growth area of the Internet of Things and represents a huge opportunity in its development. A common and global vision will remove fragmentation, accelerate the availability of industry standard solutions and help the market to fulfil its potential.”
In addition, the members of the recently announced NB-IoT Forum have agreed that this will now be part of the GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative and will focus on fostering a global ecosystem for NB-IoT technology. A key element of the forum will be the creation of ‘Open IoT Labs’ that will be available to any operator, module vendor or application provider and are designed to develop and accelerate the commercial availability of LPWA technology as well as encourage organisations to create NB-IoT enabled devices and applications for a variety of different verticals. They will also provide an opportunity for end-to-end and interoperability testing.
