The IoT services agreement will be initially valid for five years
Swedish vendor Ericsson and China Telecom signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly deploy and offer global internet of things connectivity to enterprise customers through Ericsson Device Connection Platform (DCP).
The agreement will initially cover a five-year period, the European company said.
DCP is a cloud-based platform that will enable the Chinese telco to offer enterprises IoT device deployment and help customers manage IoT products efficiently and flexibly. “DCP enables operators to cooperate globally to provide IoT device management, subscription management, network connectivity administration and flexible billing services,” China Telecom’s VP Tongqing Gao said. “Therefore, the customers can seamlessly deploy and manage their IoT devices globally in order to ensure globally unified service procedure, consistent user experience, significantly improving efficiency and reducing the cost.”
“By 2021, we forecast there will be 28 billion connected devices worldwide, of which 16 billion will be IoT connected devices,” Ericsson China President Juntao Zhao said. “These IoT applications will help promote the development of 5G technology. This partnership with China Telecom aims to accelerate the large-scale deployment of IoT across the world.”
Ericsson DCP is used by over 20 global operators to provide IoT connectivity services, serving more than 1,500 enterprises across 100 countries.
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China Telecom ended June with 90.1 million LTE subscribers, having posted 5.55 million net customer additions during the month. The telco’s overall mobile subscriber base reached nearly 207 million at the end of the second quarter of the year.
BMW ConnectedDriver users can book Wi-Fi connectivity through Deutsche Telekom’s HotSpot Drive portal
In related news, German telco Deutsche Telekom said that users of BMW ConnectedDrive can now book a Wi-Fi hots pot using the telco’s HotSpot Drive portal. The mobile hot spot makes it possible to connect up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices to high-speed internet at the same time, without any need for them to have their own SIM cards.
The moving Wi-Fi hot spot was first integrated into new BMW 7 series models in October 2015. Other models are soon to follow. Starting this summer, Deutsche Telekom will be fitting BMW ConnectedDrive systems with LTE technology.
The German operator also said that Deutsche Telekom’s SmartHome app has been available for use in the BMW ConnectedDrive system since 2015. Through this app, drivers can turn on the house lights while still on the road or to regulate the room temperature in advance of their arrival home.