Technology allows early access to some of the fifth-generation mobile functionalities. Agreement with Apkappa to make water monitoring and urban lighting smart with NB-IoT.
Complete Narrowband-IoT coverage in Italy. The 100% coverage of 4G sites using this technology will enable businesses and public authorities to gain early access to some 5G capabilities, facilitating specific use cases for energy, healthcare, environmental and structural monitoring, and opening up new opportunities in fields such as precision agriculture, smart cities and smart utilities. The agricultural sector, for example, will be able to benefit from new sophisticated monitoring, irrigation and automated feeding systems, thus paving the way for the farm of the future. In the field of structural monitoring, on the other hand, it will be possible to implement low-power alarm systems in buildings located in geographical areas prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods.
NB-IoT operates on licensed 800 MHz band and it is a data transmission standard on cellular networks that integrates the features of a Low Power Wide Area (Lpwa) network with those of LTE 2G, 3G, and 4G cellular networks. The main advantages of this technology are: strong coverage over vast areas – even when devices are underground or in poorly covered environments (20 decibels more coverage compared to GSM); greater energy efficiency which extends the battery life of connected objects even beyond 10 years, and support for up to 50,000 devices in a single cell without risk of congestion. The recent inclusion of NB-IoT within the 5G standards by the 3GPP standardisation body also ensures the coexistence of the two technologies, further extending the lifecycle of NB-IoT.
On the occasion of the NB-IoT network's completion, Vodafone announces its agreement with Apkappa., a company within the Maggioli Group operating in the smart city innovative solutions sector, to equip devices produced by it with Vodafone NB-IoT connectivity Apkappa; These devices make it possible to render mechanical meters “smart” and thus remotely manage water and public lighting networks. Given their features, they have been adopted by various utility companies and will now be able to benefit from all the potential of the new Vodafone NB-IoT technology. In the next five years, an implementation of at least an additional 100,000 units is planned, all communicating in NB-IoT.
Among Vodafone's other projects in the NB-IoT field, the one with Arduino for the creation of joint commercial solutions based on Arduino hardware technology and Vodafone connectivity.
As of last year, furthermore, the company has opened a laboratory in Milan which, with a view to open innovation and co-creation, allows companies and public administrations to test the potential of NB-IoT, and to try out their applications before commercial launch, in a secure environment capable of exactly replicating the network technology's performance.
The development of NB-IoT in Italy is part of a broader coverage plan by the Vodafone Group, which recently announced that by 2019 it will double the reach of this technology across Europe, effectively creating the world's most extensive NB-IoT international network. In addition to Italy, Vodafone has launched its NB-IoT network in the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey, and by 2019 will fully cover the United Kingdom, Romania, and Spain.
Vodafone currently connects approximately 74 million objects worldwide, 9.2 million of which are in Italy. These numbers are set to grow, thanks to the widespread availability of NB-IoT across the country. Once fully implemented, this technology will enable the connection of over three and a half billion devices, a figure more than thirty times the current number of active SIM cards in Italy.
From: corrierecomunicazioni.it
