I understand the advantages of NB-IoT and the industry chain

This article will introduce you to this new technology - NB-IoT, from the meaning value, characteristic advantages, the industry chain driven by the manufacturers and the development path of the manufacturers, future investment opportunities and other comprehensive interpretation.

In September last year, the global communications industry reached a consensus on the formation of a low-power, wide-area coverage (LPWA) IoT standard, and the NB-IoT standard came into being. This year, with the completion of the test of NB-IoT, it officially entered the commercial stage, and the industry's attention and discussion on it is gradually heating up.

This week, DR Jun will introduce this new technology to NB-IoT in detail, from the meaning value, characteristic advantages, the industry chain driven by the manufacturer, the development path of the manufacturer, and future investment opportunities.

NB-IoT, do you think it is Niubility Internet of Thing? No, no, NB-IoT refers to the Narrow Band - Internet of Things technology.

On June 16 this year, the NB-IoT technology protocol was approved by the 3GPP Radio Access Network (RAN) Technical Specification Group. It took less than eight months from the establishment of the project to the freezing of the agreement, making it one of the fastest established 3GPP standards in history. After the performance standard is finalized in September and the conformance test is completed in December, NB-IoT can enter the commercial phase.

First, why does NB-IoT appear?

According to market research firm Gartner, in 2016, 6.4 billion IoT devices will be used globally, and 5.5 million devices will be connected every day. One of the foundations of “Internet of Everything” is the transmission of data, different Internet of Things. Business has different requirements for data transmission capability and real-time performance.

According to the different transmission rates, IoT services can be distinguished by high, medium and low speed:

• High-rate services: mainly use 3G and 4G technologies, such as in-vehicle IoT devices and surveillance cameras, and the corresponding business features require real-time data transmission;

• Medium-rate services: mainly use GPRS technology, such as lockers in residential quarters or supermarkets, which are frequently used but not used in real time. The requirements for network transmission speed are far less than high-speed services;

• Low-rate services: The industry has classified the low-rate business market into the LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) market, a low-power WAN. At present, there is no corresponding cellular technology, and in most cases, it is supported by GPRS technology, which brings about a problem of high cost and low penetration of low-rate services.

That is to say, the current low-rate business market is in urgent need of development, and the low-speed business market is actually the largest market, such as fire extinguishers in buildings, various monitors used in scientific research, and the frequency of such devices in life is very low. But the total number of collections is considerable, and the collection of these data is used for various purposes, such as improving the configuration of urban equipment.

NB-IoT is a new narrowband cellular communication LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology that can help us solve this problem.

Second, what are the advantages of NB-IoT?

As a technology applied in low-rate services, the advantages of NB-IoT are not difficult to imagine:

• Strong links: In the case of the same base station, NB-IoT can provide 50-100 times more access than existing wireless technologies. One sector can support 100,000 connections, supporting low latency sensitivity, ultra-low device cost, low device power consumption, and optimized network architecture. For example, due to bandwidth limitation, operators only open 8-16 access ports for each router in the home, while a family often has multiple mobile phones, laptops, and tablets. In the future, it is necessary to realize the whole house intelligence. The need for networking across hundreds of sensing devices has become a daunting challenge. And NB-IoT is enough to easily meet the needs of a large number of devices in the future smart home networking.

• High coverage: NB-IoT has strong indoor coverage and 20dB gain over LTE, which is equivalent to an increase of 100 times coverage. Not only can it meet the wide coverage needs of rural areas, but also for applications such as factory areas, underground garages, and Manhole Covers that require deep coverage. Take the manhole cover monitoring as an example. In the past, the GPRS method required an antenna to be extended, and the vehicle was extremely vulnerable to damage. The NB-IoT can solve this problem as long as it is properly deployed.

• Low power consumption: Low power consumption is an important indicator for IoT applications, especially for equipment and occasions where batteries cannot be replaced frequently, such as various types of sensing monitoring equipment placed in remote areas of the high mountains and wilderness. When a smartphone is charged every day, battery life for several years is the most essential requirement. NB-IoT focuses on small data volume and small rate applications, so the power consumption of NB-IoT devices can be very small, and the battery life can be greatly improved from the past few months to several years.

• Low cost: Compared to LoRa, NB-IoT does not need to be rebuilt, and both RF and antenna are basically multiplexed. Taking China Mobile as an example, there is a relatively wide frequency band in 900MHZ. Only a part of the 2G frequency band needs to be cleared, and the simultaneous deployment of LTE and NB-IoT can be directly performed. Low speed, low power consumption and low bandwidth also bring low cost advantages to NB-IoT chips and modules. The module is expected to cost no more than $5.

However, NB-IoT still has its own limitations. In terms of cost, the cost of NB-IoT module is expected to fall to less than US$5 in the future, but the price of the chips supporting Bluetooth, Thread and ZigBee is only about US$2, and only one of the standard chips is less than the price. 1. The huge price gap will undoubtedly cause enterprises to deploy NB-IoT to raise concerns.

In addition, most IoT scenarios such as smart door locks, data monitoring, etc. do not require real-time wireless networking, and only need to be near field communication or wired. If you replace NB-IoT, is it worth it?

Third, the industrial chain of NB-IoT

Compared with traditional industries, the industrial ecology of the Internet of Things is relatively large, and it needs to be analyzed from two dimensions: vertical industry chain and horizontal technology standard.

For the low-power wide-area network, from the vertical perspective, the complete industrial chain from the "bottom chip-module-terminal-operator-application" has been formed.

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Among them, the chip is at the core of the NB-IoT industry chain. Now almost all mainstream chip and module manufacturers have a clear NB-IoT support plan.

Huawei's acquisition of Neul's chip is relatively early, and there are already test samples; Qualcomm's chips are expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, and Qualcomm's chips are NB-IoT and eMTC dual-mode chips; Intel's chips are expected this year. The first batch of chips will be provided in the quarter, but mainly based on testing, commercial chips will be released at the beginning of next year; MTK chips are also under development and will be released in the first half of next year; ZTE Micro and Datang chips are also in development. among.

Below we select Huawei and Qualcomm to talk specifically. Why choose these two? Because in the history of the evolution of the NB-IoT standard, Huawei and Qualcomm play a very important role. The current NB-IoT evolved from the solution NB-CIoT generated by Huawei and Qualcomm. (Details, you can make your own Baidu)

1. Huawei

As an active participant in NB-IoT, NB-IoT is a big strategy. It is said that all Huawei departments are actively involved.

In fact, as early as 2014, Huawei spent $25 million to acquire Neul, the UK's leading provider of cellular IoT chips and solutions. It also plans to build a global-level Internet of Things centered on Neul.

Unsurprisingly, after the standard was announced, Neul will soon launch the NB-IoT commercial chip at the end of this month. This will be the industry's first commercially available NB-IoT chip, and its chip price is close to the price of short-range communication chips.

It is reported that Huawei's NB-IoT chip integrates BB and AP, Flash and battery management in the size of the coin, and reserves sensor integration. The AP contains three ARM-M0 cores, each of which is responsible for application, security, and communication functions, which reduces cost and power consumption while facilitating function management. The subsequent chips will also integrate with Soft SIM to further reduce cost.

In addition, after the first batch of chips will be available at the end of September, Huawei will also cooperate with UBLox and Mobile to provide the first commercial modules. The commercial modules will be released in mid-October or late. The first batch is not large enough and will be commercially available on the large scale early next year.

In addition to the chip, Huawei's layout in the NB-IoT field is omnidirectional.

At this year's World Mobile Congress IoT Summit, Huawei officially released an end-to-end NB-IoT solution for the world, including: Huawei Lite OS and NB-IoT chip enabled intelligent terminal solutions, smooth evolution to NB- IoT's eNodeB base station, IoT Packet Core capable of supporting Core in a Box or NFV slice flexible deployment, cloud-based architecture and IoT connection management platform with big data capability, etc., meet the low-power wide-area coverage of operators' IoT services. Core needs.

In addition, at the 2nd China NB-IoT Industry Alliance Summit held last month, Xu Haiping, the head of Huawei's NB-IoT project, said that the open lab that Huawei is building will be better for NB-IoT. End-to-end business services. "Since this year, Huawei has set up seven open laboratories around the world. Now it has opened two, one is Vodafone and the other is Huawei's research institute. The open laboratory is mainly to build a complete set of end-to-end NB-IoT. Environment, providing NB-IoT chips and modules, and some close-knit partners to do end-to-end docking, including chip module integration, back-end connection management platform, business server docking, etc. Vodafone's open The laboratory is mainly aimed at European partners. The Shanghai lab is mainly for the Chinese region. In September, an open lab will be established in South Korea, and countries such as Italy will also advance."

2, Qualcomm

Qualcomm believes that in the next five years, from the perspective of the Internet of Things, LTE is still the basis for development. The NB-IoT introduced under 3GPP Release 13 will continue to evolve with the development of 3GPP. The low cost and low power consumption required for large-scale Internet of Things (Massive IoT) will rely on LTE NB-IoT technology to promote from the cellular connection. Its development lays a good foundation for the development of 5G technology of the Internet of Things.

Qualcomm launched the MDM 9x07 at the beginning of this year, supporting Cat 4, with a maximum support of 150Mbps; the other is MDM 92071, which supports the Cat 1 standard; and the MDM 9206, which was launched last October, supports CatM1, and later supports NB through software upgrades. IoT. Module OEMs are expected to release modules based on MDM 9206 that support Cat M1 in early 2017, and support for Cat NB1 is expected to be implemented through software upgrades shortly thereafter.

In addition, in the current Release 13, NB-IoT does not support VoLTE, but in the future Release 14, Qualcomm will try to increase the support of voice functions. As NBIoT continues to evolve, Qualcomm hopes it will lay the foundation for the Internet of Things standards for 5G.

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