Vodafone starts banging on about NB-IoT again

It has been a few months since Vodafone last told everyone how great NB-IoT is so it’s time for another round of evangelising.

The first half of this year saw an unrelenting torrent of incremental NB-IoT announcements from Vodafone, which seems to have adopted the nascent LPWAN tech as a bit of a personal crusade, despite the fact that it will require broad consensus from hundreds of companies across many industries to succeed.

That all culminated in Vodafone IoT boss Erik Brenneis conceding that, after all that fuss, Vodafone wasn’t going to do anything significant on the NB-IoT front until next year anyway, after which the company had the good taste to adopt a dignified silence, which it was presumed at the time would last for at least the rest of the year.

But that was apparently asking too much in the light of Vodafone’s puppyish excitement at the prospect of a zillion new microscopic SIMs coming online. Like a child in a library the pressure of having to keep quiet seems to have been too much for the company’s loquacious comms team.

‘VODAFONE IS FIRST TO ANNOUNCE NB-IoT LAUNCH MARKETS’ blurted the press release, with additional catharsis derived from the news that Voda expects to be launching NB-IoT in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain in Q1 2017. It turns out that all Voda needs to do is a simple software upgrade to its existing 4G base stations to bring the dream to life, which makes you wonder why it’s taking so long.

“The questions of battery life and deep in-building penetration have now been answered by NB-IoT,” pronounced Ivo Rook, another senior Vodafone IoT dude. “The low cost of the modules means we can expect a new wave of connected devices and soaring market demand. Vodafone’s world leading expertise and experience in IoT will prove invaluable in shaping this exciting market.”

So we’re still looking at next year and, with any luck, having scratched the itch for now we can expect another period of patient silence from Vodafone on the matter of NB-IoT. Even a month will do. You know it makes sense.