Wireless equipment giant Ericsson announced three initiatives around the “Internet of Things” at CES 2016, all software-based offerings focused on helping its customers monetize IoT. The company’s three announcements focused on data analytics, low-power connectivity and smart metering.
Ericsson’s data analytics software is said to be a real-time analytics engine embedded into the operator’s database. Ericsson said the vendor agnostic solution will be able to incorporate data from other sources to create “cross-industry IoT insights” and help operators “climb up the value chain.” The software will be commercially available by the end of the second quarter, Ericsson said.
The company is also launching software to upgrade existing mobile network infrastructure to support narrowband IoT, a new standard that is likely to be part of 3GPP Release 13.
“NB-IoT is well suited to IoT applications such as metering and sensor monitoring and flexibly scales to support millions of connections per cell site,” the company said in a press release. “It also reduces module costs by 90% and provides seven times better coverage. Combined with power-saving improvements, it delivers more than 10-year device battery life while maintaining downlink reachability.”
But one problem with NB IoT could be the need to deploy new infrastructure to support it. That’s the issue Ericsson hopes to resolve with its software update for existing infrastructure.
“Ericsson’s new software will enable us to expand our coverage of low-cost IoT devices while supporting years of battery life,” said Adam Koeppe, VP for network technology and planning at Verizon Communications.
Smart metering is the focus of Ericsson’s third IoT initiative announced this week. The company said it has already enabled 42 million smart meters worldwide and now wants to offer smart metering as a service. Ericsson said it can act as a single point of contact for IT service providers, telecom operators and field services companies, enabling utilities to cut costs and time-to-market.
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