Ericsson, Qualcomm and Microsoft have all announced initiatives designed to move the whole internet of things thing along a bit.

At MWC Shanghai Ericsson and China Mobile (pictured) signed a cooperation agreement for the latter to use the former’s Device Connection Platform to augment its IoT efforts.

“Ericsson is a global leader in IoT with solid cooperation with operators’ associations GMA and Bridge (Association), providing connecting services for nearly 30 operators in over 100 countries and markets, and accumulating rich technical experience and industry resources in the field of IoT,” said Qiao Hui, GM of the China Mobile IoT Company.

“By launching DCP, we will be able to solve unified connection management and roaming across borders for our international customers, while at the same time share business opportunities in the global IoT market, which will further drive the expansion of IoT business overseas for China Mobile, and improve our market competitiveness in this field.”

Qualcomm, meanwhile, is claiming the world’s first commercial IoT development platform supporting field upgrade to LTE IoT. This also seems to involve China Mobile, which seems to be having a busy time of it at MWC Shanghai, a company called Gizwits, which specialises in IoT development platforms, and manufacturer Quectel.

“The expansion of the IoT depends on the ecosystem’s ability to deliver vast amounts of solutions featuring edge intelligence and flexible connectivity that stays current through the device life,” said Serge Willenegger, GM, 4G/5G and Industrial IoT at Qualcomm. “We are grateful of the opportunity to work with Gizwits, China Mobile Shandong Branch and Quectel.”

“The IoT enabling infrastructure is rapidly evolving,” said Jack Huang, CEO of Gizwits. “A challenge during this growing process for developers and manufacturers is the concern that the products they deliver today may not work well in tomorrow’s environment.

“For example, telecommunication operators throughout the world are phasing out 2G networks, leaving manufacturers with the tough choices of either sticking with the 2G modem technology that has worked well but may not be supported in the near future, or switching to LTE technologies, such as NB-IoT or eMTC, with limited network coverage in many regions.”

“The path of the IoT ecosystem toward 5G goes through LTE IoT, including the NB-IoT mode,” said Yong Chen, GM of enterprise business, China Mobile Shandong Branch. “Qualcomm Technologies and Gizwits are collaborating to help our customers get ready for the future as we deploy the latest cellular technologies across our network infrastructure.”

Lastly Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge, its cloud platform for IoT devices. “Today, we are excited to announce Azure IoT Edge is now generally available (GA) globally – enabling our growing list of enterprise customers to bring their edge solutions to production,” blogged Microsoft’s Sam George.

“We are also introducing new robust capabilities on Azure IoT Edge to easily develop and deploy intelligence to the edge. These robust updates position Azure IoT Edge as a true end-to-end solution for enterprise-grade edge deployments.”

As 5G inches closer to reality, the industry seems to be getting real about IoT too. All three of these announcements seem to be concrete steps towards providing substantial IoT services to the market and China is looking like a major driver of that activity.