All industries need to go through a cycle of development, from the early stage of technology germination to media publicity and then to the painful period of technology, NB-IoT industry is no exception. After the development of 2017, NB-IoT industry has gradually crossed the rift valley and entered the fast lane of development.

Diao Zhifeng, Vice President of Huawei Honeycomb Internet of Things Product Line, told the international electronic business situation: "We see that in 2017 many NB-IoT industry applications began to deploy and incubate; 2018 will be a large-scale process, and the network and connection level of NB-IoT will become larger and larger. According to statistics, there are 36 NB-IoT commercial networks in the world, with an area coverage rate of 25% and a population coverage rate of about 40%. With the surge of market demand for NB-IoT this year, we expect that by the end of this year, the global NB-IoT commercial network will expand to about 100, the area coverage will reach 45%, and the population coverage will exceed 65%. "

As the upstream and downstream manufacturers of chips and terminals begin to actively prepare for battle, the number of connections in 2018 will reach tens of millions or even billions of demand. Conservatively, it is estimated that the number of connection terminals will reach at least 3 billion by 2020, and the market prospects are broad.

NB-IoT chip SOC, price reduced to $1 in 2019

If you ask the terminal manufacturer what is the most pressing requirement for NB-IoT, the answer is cost reduction. In 2017, the three major operators are actively promoting the decline of chip/module prices, allowing terminal manufacturers to obtain acceptable prices through subsidies. In 2017, China Mobile announced a special subsidy of 2 billion yuan for Internet of Things, including 1 billion yuan for NB-IoT module chips; China Telecom also tendered up to 500,000 NB-IoT modules, subsidizing 36 yuan for each NB-IoT module.

Zhao Jianjun, general manager of Internet of Things Branch of China Telecom Co., Ltd., said: "After one year's efforts, our LPWAN technology has begun to approach the acceptable range of the market in terms of cost. For the terminal and module market, China Telecom has been working to reduce the price of terminals and modules in 2017. Up to now, the NB-IoT module on the market has approached the level of $5 we expected. With the birth of more applications and the development of the market, the price of modules will be lower and lower in the future. If the volume is large, it may be reduced to about $2-3, which will accelerate the response. Popularization of use. "

Huawei Diao Zhifeng also said: "From March to April 2017, the price of our NB-IoT module was 150 yuan, but now the price has dropped to about 40-50 yuan. In history, no industry has been able to develop so fast and the price of modules has been lowered so fast in a short year. "

Driven by the industry, chip module manufacturers begin to drive down the cost from bottom to top. According to statistics, there are more than 14 mainstream chip suppliers in the industry. Module suppliers are multiplying. Module manufacturers such as Yuanyuan and Lilda have begun to ship in batches, which will certainly accelerate the decline of the price of NB-IoT modules in 2018.

"The target price of $5 module is not suitable for China's national conditions, because we compare the price of WiFi and GPRS modules. So according to my personal forecast, the target price of NB-IoT module in China market is US$2-3, which will push the price of NB-IoT chip into the US$1 era after the industrial scale in 2019. "Xiong Haifeng, president of Shanghai Shixin Communication Technology Co., Ltd., said.

The urgent low price demand of industry brings new challenges to the design of NB-IoT chips. It is necessary to find a balance between the performance and cost of chips, including chip architecture, chip function definition, process and Foundry selection, peripheral circuits and devices.

Xiong Haifeng pointed out that the future NB-IoT chip must be the trend of chip modularization and SOC. If the performance of the receiver is good enough, DC/DC, FEM, SAW and other peripheral circuits can be simplified to reduce the cost of the module. On the other hand, the optimization and innovation of the chip architecture can solidify the core functions of the chip and the communication functions by hardware, such as PSRAM and DSP.

As a new honeycomb Internet of Things chip company founded in February 2017, the first product aimed at the NB-IoT market and launched EC616 chip. It is understood that the chip can achieve minimal peripheral circuits, while the internal structure optimization, so that the chip architecture, power consumption, production capacity has been greatly improved.

In addition, Xiong Haifeng also mentioned two other difficulties in chip design. First, NB-IoT standards and industry are developing rapidly. Chips need to follow up standards quickly in a short time, product evolution and iteration and quickly reach stable maturity. This requires high frequency performance index, protocol consistency, compatibility and stability of base stations.

Secondly, in order to achieve the low power consumption of battery for 10 years, it is necessary to optimize the design from chip architecture to implementation and practical application. These difficulties are also the development trend of NB-IoT chips, which need the joint efforts of players in the industry chain to promote the maturity of technology.

The Age of NB-IoT Intelligent City Project Scaling Has Comed with the Promotion of Policy and Funds

The first wave of application of NB-IoT is intelligent city projects such as hydroelectric meter, intelligent street lamp and Smoke Sense, which are promoted by the government. In smart cities, businesses like hydropower, gas and meter reading are currently the fastest growing applications of NB-IoT. According to Huawei Diao Zhifeng, the era of large-scale application of NB-IoT has arrived, and the application of public utilities (water and electricity meter reading business) has now reached at least 15 million orders of magnitude.

Taking Yingtan, a model pilot city of NB-IoT/eMTC in China, as an example, according to Su Pengcheng, deputy director of Yingtan Industrial Informatization Committee, Yingtan has become the first city in the whole country to apply intelligent meter reading. Yingtan Water Company has 130,000 users, including 124,000 smart meters, accounting for 95.5%, and 70,000 networked water meters based on NB-IoT technology. The online rate of water meter based on NB-IoT technology reaches 99.34%, which fully demonstrates the advantages of NB-IoT technology in deep coverage and intelligent water affairs.

Su Pengcheng is quite proud to say that Yingtan has become the first city in China to build full coverage of NB-IoT and eMTC networks: in 2017, three major operators built 962 NB-IoT base stations in Yingtan; Jiangxi Mobile took the lead in opening eMTC base stations in Yingtan, with the same coverage capacity as NB-IoT, and China Telecom has taken Yingtan as an eMTC pilot.

In addition to the three meters business, Yingtan is also in the joint Sunshine Lighting, the United States lighting business and other enterprises, vigorously promote the development of intelligent street lamp projects, 2017 has more than 7000 intelligent street lamp layout.

In the process of promoting NB-IoT smart city applications such as three meters and intelligent street lights, there are also many pain points. For example, there are some problems in the three-meter service, such as concurrency, delay and low success rate of data reporting. Intelligent street lights are also facing problems such as large concurrency, base station congestion and packet loss, difficulty in fault location and repeated issuance of commands by customer platforms.

"For intelligent street lighting projects, the success rate of batch control is a key indicator in the application of the Internet of Things that needs reverse control. For street lamp application itself, how to realize batch control and automation? What should we do in a dormant state? In addition, there are "concurrency, base station congestion and fault location difficulties" which need to be solved, which are the problems that major manufacturers are facing extensively at present, "said Zhao Jianjun, China Telecom.

Zhao Jianjun said, "In 2017, through the practice with many manufacturers, we have accumulated very rich practical experience and formed a very complete optimization / solution mechanism. At present, we have achieved multi-directional "NB-IoT+Three Tables" Application Layout in more than 20 provinces and cities, and also achieved more than 1 million online business development.

It is worth mentioning that NB-IoT will also have tens of millions of scale in sharing intelligent traffic such as bicycles. "We can see that government departments are very interested in the NB-IoT project of battery car monitoring, especially the positive response of the public security and traffic police system. In fact, a large proportion of traffic accidents are related to battery cars. In many provinces, the government has strict control over battery cars. It is hoped that all battery cars will be monitored. We know that battery cars are usually not licensed, and the management is chaotic. If a battery car runs away after hitting someone, there is no way to catch people. If each battery car is equipped with NB-IoT monitor, the functions of location query, trajectory playback, early warning and control can be realized. This year, Huawei will cooperate with the government in Zhengzhou to monitor 1 million battery cars. Huawei Diao Zhifeng said.

It is understood that prior to the monitoring of electric vehicles there are also RFID programs. However, according to the feedback from Huzhou Public Security Bureau, the lack of unified RFID standards, seamless coverage and uneven technological level of manufacturers seriously restrict its application in public security control and public services, and also make the cost of system infrastructure construction remain high and the cost-effective ratio of investment difficult to improve.

In contrast, in the monitoring system of electric bicycle based on NB-IoT, the external network side platform is provided by operators, and then transmitted to the control center of public security network through VPN and other encryption routes through interfaces. This important improvement promotes the unification of platforms and standards, facilitates secondary development and compatibility of different brands of products; professional licensed spectrum operators'networks have higher security, and reduces the pressure of network operation and maintenance and construction costs.

With the rapid development of industry, the application of NB-IoT will be promoted from smart city to enterprise/industry application. In 2018, international e-commerce believes that more innovative applications will emerge in traditional fields such as agriculture and industry, which will make use of NB-IoT for digital transformation. For example, "cattle networking" application can enable dairy farmers to control the health and milk production of cows in a timely manner, reduce losses and increase profits.

The problem facing smart cities at present is that most water meters, electricity meters, gas meters and street lighting companies are reluctant to pay for new technologies such as NB-IoT, and lack of motivation to adopt new technologies to transform the original pattern. In contrast, NB-IoT brings real benefits to operators such as dairy farmers in the traditional industries, and the whole industry has a strong desire for intelligent upgrading. Now, "pig networking" and "sheep networking" are also being tried out. Agriculture will become the next large-scale application of NB-IoT in traditional industries.