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China Mobile scrambles to catch up after supporting wrong 'internet of things' standard

World’s largest wireless network operator put at a disadvantage by central government’s decision to back narrow band IoT, a standard it does not support

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China Mobile’s 4G network is based on the mainland-developed standard called time-division long-term evolution (TD-LTE). Photo: AFP

China Mobile, the world’s largest wireless network operator by subscribers, may be scrambling to catch up with rivals China Unicom and China Telecom to deploy so-called internet of things (IoT) infrastructure, following the Chinese government’s directive on a preferred standard for that technology.

The domestic telecommunications market leader, with 863.4 million mobile subscribers as of May 31, has found itself in that position after the Ministry of Industry & Information Technology (MIIT) decided in June to support the standard called narrow band internet of things (NB-IoT) for all low-power, wide-area IoT services in the country, according to Jefferies equity analyst Edison Lee.

The MIIT is aiming to develop 1.5 million mobile base stations that support the NB-IoT standard by 2020, up from an estimated 400,000 this year.

“As future evolutions of NB-IoT will be integrated into 5G, China is keen to support it aggressively,” Lee said on Monday.

IoT represents a super network of networks, consisting of internet-linked devices, sensors and software applications embedded in various physical objects to gather, send and receive data for analysis.

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