December 16, 2015

Industry Collaboration Driving Standards in the IoT, by Dr Shane Rooney, Executive Director, GSMA

The GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative is a collaboration of 26 mobile operators, OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies, formed to accelerate the development and commercial availability of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) solutions in licensed spectrum.

LPWA networks are designed for M2M applications that have low data rates, require long battery lives and operate unattended for long periods of time, often in remote locations. They are expected to be used for a wide variety of applications such as industrial asset tracking, safety monitoring, water and gas metering, smart grids, city parking, vending machines and city lighting. The technology will also be used to connect wearable devices for people or animals.

Due to the diversity of IoT application requirements, some technologies are better at addressing particular LPWA use cases. For this reason, we encourage 3GPP to agree three common and complementary licensed standards that will cover all LPWA use cases. These are Narrow Band IoT (NB_IoT), Extended Coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS ^[1]) and LTE Machine Type Communication (LTE_MTC) in Release 13.

The timing of Release 13 has motivated the Mobile IoT Initiative to act decisively to agree these technologies which, once approved, will ensure that they are commercially available and in market as quickly as possible providing customers with a choice which will accelerate adoption and help the Internet of Things to flourish.

The Mobile IoT Initiative will implement multiple global pilots in early 2016, with full commercial solutions starting later in the year. Also, the GSMA will host the 3GPP RAN NB-IOT ad-hoc Meeting (RAN1, 2, 3 & 4) from 18-22 January, in Budapest, as they work towards finalising the details of the NB-IoT standards.

^{[Note 1]}  (updated 20/2/16): EC-GPRS is not in the 3GPP work plan - at GERAN#69 (GP-160221) it was agreed to change the name of the feature EC-EGPRS to EC-GSM-IoT in order to better reflect the targeted market and application for this technology.

Further reading:

• GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative, go to: http://www.gsma.com/connectedliving/mobile-iot-initiative/
• GSMA’s Connected Living programme, go to: http://www.gsma.com/connectedliving/
• The 3GPP News story on NB-IOT (September 2015)

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting nearly 800 operators with more than 250 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces industry-leading events such as Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress Shanghai and the Mobile 360 Series conferences.

Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP