NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) is one of the most exciting new technologies of the past year and Deutsche Telekom is actively pushing its development and rollout in the markets across Europe. One of the main initiatives it has organized to achieve such a push in the past year is the NB-IoT Prototyping Hub.
The Hub is a program specifically designed to accelerate market adoption by bringing existing and potential customers together with specialized NB-IoT developers and start-ups. The start-ups that work with Deutsche Telekom can use the company’s live NB IoT trial base stations to test new applications and sensors in its labs in Bonn, Berlin and Krakow/Poland. They are supported by a dedicated NB-IoT toolkit and technical experts.
The work achieved since the Hub’s inception in mid-2016 has been astounding. Over 100 developers have driven solutions across multiple industries, including the utilities sector, smart lighting, smart parking, industrial solutions, tracking, smart waste management, and smart building applications. Deutsche Telekom is celebrating these successes during its NarrowBand IoT Prototyping Hub Summit in Bonn this week. The final 16 solutions have been handpicked for a demonstration of their NB-IoT prototypes using Deutsche Telekom’s European customer experience live trial networking. These include exciting examples such as Ayyeka, a smart water management solution developed in Israel, Bee & Me, a smart agriculture application from Montenegro or Flashnet, a Romanian company which enables smart lighting.
“NarrowBand IoT is an incredibly important technology for us on the road to 5G and we are therefore highly active in pushing its ecosystem,” said Tomasz Gerszberg, Senior Vice President Business Operations, Deutsche Telekom. “Deutsche Telekom’s NarrowBand IoT Prototyping Hub was and is a tremendously successful tool to achieve this push. We have in just 6 months enabled 16 live NB-IoT use cases, after the initial NB-IoT parking solution we introduced last October in Bonn.“
NarrowBand IoT – a look ahead
Deutsche Telekom will continue its work with the IoT start-up community, but will also look to bring these first successes to the market. “The next steps are to get the most promising and needed NB-IoT solutions out into the real world so they can benefit our customers and their clients, be that specific business sectors or the public at large,” adds Gerszberg. “We aim to have at least 10 customer trials completed by the middle of this year.”
In addition, Deutsche Telekom has recently announced the roll out of NB-IoT in eight of its markets, including in Germany, where Deutsche Telekom will commercially launch NB-IoT in the second quarter of 2017. In the Netherlands, the nationwide implementation of the NB-IoT network is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2017 and in its other European markets, including Austria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, there are plans to extend the already existing NB-IoT coverage to more cities.