Ericsson, Wednesday announced the launch of three new Internet of Things (IoT) solution portfolios - Smart Metering as a Service, User & IoT Data Analytics and Networks Software 17A.
The Smart Metering as a Service portfolio enables end-to-end business process outsourcing to provide reduced time-to-market, superior meter management and lower total cost of ownership. With this, Ericsson acts as a single point of contact with IT service providers, telecom operators and field services companies.
The User & IoT Data Analytics is designed to allow operators to provide a real-time analytics engine embedded in the subscriber database. This solution extends Ericsson's User Data Consolidation (UDC) offering, and works for both cellular- and non-cellular devices. It can also fetch data from other vendors' network data bases and aggregate them in the analysis.
Ericsson's Networks Software 17A is developed to support millions of IoT device connections per cell site. The software-only upgrade is able to introduce Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), the newest device category for LTE connections to the existing network infrastructure. This software will become commercially available in the forth quarter of this year.
According to Ericsson, NB-IoT is well suited to IoT applications such as metering and sensor monitoring and flexibly scales to support millions of connections per cell site. It also reduces module costs by 90 percent and provides seven times better coverage, claims Ericsson.
