China Unicom Research Institute in collaboration with Huawei have come together to deploy a Cellular Internet-of-Things (CIoT) pilot based on the 4.5G 'LTE-Machine to Machine (LTE-M)' technology in Shanghai prior to the 2015 Mobile World Congress (MWC) Asia.
According to Huawei, LTE-M is one of the key features of 4.5G and the latest CIoT technology along the LTE evolutionary path. The company claims that compared to LTE, LTE-M which requires only 200KHz spectral resources and which re-uses existing network resources, can increase in-depth coverage gain to up to 100-fold and number of connections to over 1000-fold while reducing the device power consumption to 10%.
The pilot saw China Unicom Shanghai deploying the LTE-M CIoT for Smart Parking in the city of Shanghai, marking the first commercial application for the technology. According to Huawei, the Smart Parking system involves parking stall detectors collecting data and reporting the status of the parking lot to the server through LTE-M. The information can then be accessed by drivers in the city who are looking for available parking spots using a mobile App.
William Wang, President, Huawei Wireless FDD Product Line
Huawei supports carriers' efforts in overcoming technical challenges encountered when entering vertical industries and helps them seize the vast potential opportunities. LTE-M will be commercialized globally in 2016. We have already collaborated extensively with carriers in China, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.
