Cisco completes live trials of Narrow Band IoT

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Cisco announced that its Cisco Jasper IoT connectivity management platform has completed live trials of Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) on its Control Center, paving the way for rapid growth in areas like smart meters, smart cities, smart parking, building automation, asset tracking and remote agriculture.

"IoT plays a critical role in helping companies embrace innovative new service-oriented business models, and with the addition of NB-IoT support, we are helping enterprises and service providers accelerate the delivery of more value-centric solutions to market," Macario Namie, head of IoT Strategy at Cisco Jasper, said in a statement today. "With NB-IoT, an entire new segment of devices can now be connected in a cost-effective way, driving benefits for companies and their customers at mass scale."

What is Narrow Band-IoT?

NB-IoT is a 3GPP standard for Low Power Wide Area Networking (LPWAN), which leverages existing LTE wireless communications infrastructure to provide long-range communications at a low bit rate for connected objects. Research firm Machina Research, which specializes in the IoT, M2M and big data markets, forecasts that LPWAN will drive growth of IoT at a massive scale, increasing the number of connected devices to more than 3 billion by 2023.

Cisco says companies looking to deliver NB-IoT services via connected devices are increasingly seeking the capability to manage massive-scale device deployments in mixed connectivity environments. The company adds that support for NB-IoT in the Cisco Jasper platform will give Cisco's service provider partners the ability to make it easy for enterprises to manage devices across multiple networks.

Australian telecommunications company Optus participated in the initial core network trials, and has completed integration of the Cisco Jasper platform to support NB-IoT.

"Optus sees the evolution of LTE technology to support dedicated IoT networks as a critical step towards mass adoption of IoT solutions by both enterprise and consumers, and is excited to be part of this emerging market trend," Allan Burdekin, head of NCSi Incorporating Safe and Smart Cities at Optus, says. "Incorporating Cisco Jasper into our NB-IoT plans allows us to provide a consistent user experience to our customers across both traditional cellular and NB-IoT, all on a single platform. Cisco Jasper will be a key partner in enabling our customers to grow and scale with the IoT market in the most efficient way."

Narrow Band-IoT around the world

Cisco Jasper has partnered with more than 50 service providers globally, managing IoT devices across more than 550 mobile operator networks. The company says many of these service providers have already committed to NB-IoT.

"I am convinced that LPWAN will have a huge impact on the IoT market, and for businesses in general," Rami Avidan, managing director, Tele2 IoT AB, at European telecommunications operator Tele2. "It opens up new use cases otherwise not possible, and can enable true mass-market implementations that, in many ways, will make the world smarter. We are committed to taking a leading role in driving this development alongside Cisco Jasper. Their support for NB-IoT will make it simple for our customers to manage their deployments and help accelerate global adoption."