Velcom, a branch of A1 Telekom Austria Group and ZTE jointly announced the deployment of the first scaled commercial Narrowband IoT(NB-IoT) network in Belarus.
The network was deployed in Minsk city first and then in other regions accordingly as scheduled. So far, velcom has verified smart metering and smart city solutions in the network.
The NB-IoT partnership between velcom and ZTE has started since the end of last year. In April’s Tibo exhibition, the end-to-end gas metering service demo has been successfully demonstrated. Following that, more lab tests and field tests were carried out.
Velcom is one of the leading mobile operators in Belarus dedicated to providing customers with the cutting-edge communication services. It started its 3G network rollouts in March 2010. In February 2016, velcom was the first to launch UMTS-900 throughout the whole country, bringing dramatic coverage extension and high mobile data quality.
Christian Laque, CTO, Velcom
Within the project, we installed equipment that will allow us to implement NB-IoT technology. This is an incredible breakthrough in the field of telecommunications, and we are happy to complete it together.
Pu ingchun, VP of ZTE and GM of FDD Products
ZTE is very proud to work with velcom to release the first NB-IoT commercial deployment overseas. The achievement signifies ZTE’s capabilities of providing operators with the smooth evolution solution towards 5G.
