On July 17, 2019, my country completed the complete submission of IMT-2020 (5G) candidate technical solutions. It is reported that NB-IoT technology is officially included in the set of 5G candidate technologies in the submitted plans. It is expected that the ITU will officially announce the birth of the 5G technical plan in June 2020. And NB-IoT will also become the mainstream technology of the future 5G Internet of Things.
Up to now, NB-IoT has completed the coverage of more than 300 cities nationwide, and the number of terminal connections has exceeded 60 million, and the number is increasing by tens of millions every year, covering smart cities, environmental protection, agriculture, medical care, Logistics and other industries.
The segmented application areas with the largest number of NB-IoT connections are metering and fire-fighting applications. Both gas meters and water meters have exceeded 10 million connections, and smoke detectors have also been shipped in a relatively large amount. Especially in 2019, NB-IoT has achieved rapid growth in the field of metering. In the field of metering, the application of NB-IoT has surpassed LoRa, becoming the most important wireless communication technology in the field of metering. It will continue to occupy more in the field of metering in the future. Large market share.
Although the popularity of NB-IoT has decreased in over a year, its application is still achieving rapid development in accordance with the scale of industrial development. More and more vertical industries generally accept NB-IoT technology and its industrial chain capabilities, and superimpose functional technologies around original products. Especially under the trend of 2G withdrawal, NB-IoT will gradually replace the original 2G related applications. There will be larger scale and more types of applications, such as manhole covers, parking, charging piles, etc.
Under normal circumstances, an average version will be completed in one to two years. Nowadays, with the continuous development of the Internet of Things market and the gradual enrichment of applications, correspondingly higher requirements are put forward for NB-IoT networks. For example, in the current R13 NB network and terminals, low power consumption is a condition of sacrificing communication speed. It also has restrictions on the traffic usage of the entire cell. It cannot completely replace 2G. It is only suitable for low rate and small traffic scenarios. In high-speed mobile scenarios, it is impossible to support priority-based cell reselection and
base station positioning cannot be achieved. And other disadvantages.
As early as 2018, Huawei released eRAN13.1, the world's first commercial version of NB-IoT based on the 3GPP R14 protocol. In the R14 protocol, 3GPP has defined NB-IoT performance enhancement features. Huawei eRAN 13.1 is a commercial version based on the R14 protocol:
First, seven times the user rate: the uplink peak rate reaches 157kbps, and the downlink single user peak rate reaches 102kbps. The user rate has the ability to fully replace GPRS applications.
Second, double the cell capacity: the maximum number of users in a single cell can reach more than 80,000, which is close to twice the capacity of the R13 protocol cell, providing strong support for the capacity of connecting everything.
Third, double cell coverage: Huawei’s unique uplink channel estimation enhancement technology enhances the in-depth coverage of cells and reduces the cost of operators’ investment in network construction.
Fourth, GPS-independent location positioning: The terminal does not need to integrate a GPS module, the positioning accuracy can be as low as 50 meters, and the power consumption and positioning delay are only half of the GPS solution, which can better serve asset tracking, logistics and transportation. Application scenarios such as pet tracking.
With the commercialization of the NB R14 version, the mobile Internet of Things represented by NB-IoT is an important part of the future 5G Internet of Things strategy. In the next few years, low-power large connections based on cellular networks will mainly rely on NB-IoT. With NB-IoT officially becoming a member of the 5G family, its prospects and market cannot be underestimated.
As an IoT company focusing on eSIM technology, Miracle IoT has successively released 3 NB modules based on eSIM technology, AM20E, AM21E, AM22E, among which AM20E is an ultra-small size NB module, ANSM21E supports GNNS base stations Positioning makes up for the inferior quality of NB modules that cannot achieve base station positioning. Both products support Bluetooth data transmission at the same time. The built-in eSIM and external sim switch can meet the needs of many NB-IOT business scenarios. In addition, there is also an AM22E NB module. Support low voltage, OPEN CPU function. All three products can be smoothly transitioned to R14 version through software upgrade.
