IoT partnerships dominate MWC 2016

Mobile world Congress in Barcelona has seen a variety of global telcos, equipment makers and industries announce their partnership plans as IoT continues to come closer to realisation.

Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom are to collaborate on IoT developments for urban settings, with a focus on creating smart city solutions. Under the partnership agreement, the two companies will pursue joint research and development of 5G-enabling techniques such as like network slicing and mobile edge computing.

The partners will also jointly campaign for standardisation and implementation of 5G and have formed the Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance (ngena). Their stated objective is to create international network services for enterprise customers, securely and reliably from a single source. The ngena organisation is a standalone company with independent management.

Nokia have given a live demonstration of its narrow band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system, using Intel device technology on the Vodafone network. The partners in NB-IoT want to establish it as a global standard for connecting billions of meters, sensors, tracking devices and other objects crucial for a programmable world.

Security vendor Gemalto and IoT system maker Jasper, recently acquired by Cisco, announced they’re working together to simplify global rollouts of IoT devices and services through on-demand subscription management. They aim to achieve this by integrating Jasper’s IoT service platform with Gemalto’s LinqUs On-Demand Connectivity, which is used by mobile operators, device makers and application providers. The plan is for customers to set up and manage subscriptions on devices remotely via a single embedded SIM (eSIM) in a process which will be a lot cheaper, easier and faster without sacrificing any levels of security.

Gemalto’s On-Demand Subscription Manager (OSM) and the Jasper IoT service platform will help network operators and enterprises manage the global eSIMs.

California-based Sierra Wireless also automotive product maker Valeo is to use Sierra Wireless smart modules in its next generation of telematics control units for connected cars.

The first deployment will be in vehicles built by carmaker Geely for the Russian market in order to create the automatic emergency response system that’s now a requirement for new vehicles in Russia. The technology could be extended to Geely subsidiaries which include Volvo and the London Taxi Company.

Finally AT&T showcased a proof of concept demo of its new IoT services to help Red Bull monitor its cooler fleets, meet service levels and troubleshoot issues before they appear. Red Bull will use AT&T’s Global SIMs, Control Center platform IoT Services to monitor the beverage coolers to set up an alert system from coolers around the world.