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
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.
At the Mobile World Congress Shanghai conference last week, many of the featured IoT initiatives were related to government projects such as traffic control, smart parking, air quality control, water quality and weather monitoring.