The China government has been actively promoting the development of LPWAN (low-power wide area network)-based IoT market and set NB-IoT as its standard technology, according to Digitimes Research.
China's top-three telecom operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have come out with their respective strategies to develop related IoT businesses with subsidies and to accelerate their deployments in the segment through cross-industry alliance partnerships.
However, the top-three telecom operators are not only promoting the development of the NB-IoT (LTE Cat-NB-1) standards, but also the eMTC (Enhanced Machine-Type Communications) (LTE Cat-M1) standards, making China one of the very few countries globally to deploy both the NB-IoT and eMTC networks.
While China's LPWAN networks are expected to enter commercial operations in 2018, the fact that most NB-IoT chips supporting the LTE R14 standards will not be available until early 2018 and the lack of support of NB-IoT/eMTC dual-mode chips at the moment may disrupt the schedule of part of the application services, Digitimes Research indicated.