The seven are AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon and Vodafone, which announced the Mobile IoT Initiative with the GSMA on the day before the official start of the Shanghai event.
“The Mobile IoT initiative encouraged the market to adopt licensed LPWA networks and we are now seeing this work come to fruition with multiple commercial deployments around the world, as well as the availability of hundreds of different applications and solutions,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO of the GSMA.
“It is clear that the market sees the benefit of adopting solutions that offer flexibility, security, lower costs, and cover all use cases, and we look forward to seeing other operators follow in the near future.”
All are launching Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) solutions. China Mobile and China Unicom have launched narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) across several key cities and China Telecom is launching NB-IoT networks across the country.
Vodafone has also launched NB-IoT in Spain and the Netherlands. Deutsche Telekom has launched in several cities in Germany and nationwide in the Netherlands.
AT&T and Verizon have previously announced nationwide launches of LTE-M technology.
In addition to these deployments, the GSMA also announced that its Mobile IoT Innovators programme, which is designed to encourage the development of new LPWA solutions, has reached over 500 members, underscoring the growth of the wider IoT ecosystem.
