A total of 94 commercial narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M have been launched in 50 markets, according to the GSMA’s latest count of low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks operating in licensed spectrum.
This is an increase of 53 mobile IoT networks, or 130 per cent, in 12 months, the operator association said ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019 in Barcelona. The GSMA announced 41 mobile LPWA networks at MWC 2018, and 48 in April last year. Of the 94, 25 are LTE-M networks and 69 are NB-IoT networks, up from . The GSMA also claimed 47 IoT Labs in 21 countries.
The number of operators running both technologies in tandem is also increasing, it noted. Graham Trickey, head of IoT at the GSMA, ran through a number of member uses cases being presented this week on the show floor in Barcelona.
These included Bell’s deployments of metering and environmental controls in Canada, China Unicom’s deployment of up to 70,000 and toxic-gas sensors in a single province in China, KDDI’s traffic and weather monitors for climbers on Mount Fuji, as well as examples of licensed low-power wide-area applications for supply chains, fisheries, and livestock.
