Deutsche Telekom unit T-Mobile US, the Un-carrier serving nearly 73 million customers in the U.S., claims that it has become the first wireless provider in North America to complete Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) field tests on a live commercial network working in partnership with Qualcomm and Ericsson.
Narrowband IoT or NB-IoT is an evolution of LTE technology built on industry standards and uses very small amounts of dedicated spectrum to carry data with incredible efficiency and performance.
T-Mobile stated that the field tests were conducted in partnership with Qualcomm and Ericsson across multiple sites on its live commercial LTE network in Las Vegas and involved the uses of 200 KHz of AWS spectrum.
T-Mobile also announced an agreement with the city of Las Vegas for the deployment of IoT technology throughout the city, including Narrowband IoT. Under the agreement, T-Mobile and Las Vegas are piloting a number of IoT projects, initially in the city’s Innovation District, an area close to the Las Vegas strip that is dedicated to developing emerging technologies.
Specific IoT projects include to be implemented in Las Vegas include: flood abatement, with flood and storm drainage sensors installed to provide early warning and fault detection; smart city lighting, with T-Mobile to power the city’s LED lighting using a single compact device; and environmental monitoring via sensors sited on existing light poles to monitor temperature, humidity and environmental gases.
T-Mobile noted that it will offer customers all-in-one IoT Access packs on certified Cat-1 modules.
* Recently, T-Mobile US announced the demonstration of a mobile broadband data session live in the field utilising License Assisted Access (LAA) on its commercial network. The field testing was launched in Los Angeles and achieved a 741 Mbit/s download speed using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum.
* At the same time, T-Mobile also claimed to have become the first national U.S. wireless carrier to make LTE-U available to its customers, with launches in Bellevue, Washington, Brooklyn, New York, Dearborn, Michigan, Las Vegas, Nevada, Richardson, Texas and Simi Valley, California.
