Narrowband IoT: Connectivity for special requirements

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This blog post is the first part of a series that deals with Narrowband IoT and the associated peculiarities of data transmission. In this part, I present the technology as well as the indicators that speak for or against the use of Narrowband IoT.

The mobile communications standard Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) will be available nationwide in Germany from 2021 and rightly bears the addition "IoT" in its name. With this technology, field devices such as gas, water and electricity meters or parking sensors can be connected to the cloud cost-effectively even in inhospitable and difficult-to-access environments - at least once the initial hurdles have been overcome.

What is NB-IoT?
Technologies related to a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) have become increasingly widespread in recent years. In addition to NB-IoT, the Low-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one of them. While LoRaWAN requires special gateways for communication, NB-IoT communication takes place via the mobile network and will be available nationwide in Germany by 2021.

The physical properties of this mobile communications standard singapore consumer email list enable data to be transmitted at low transmission rates of up to 159 kbit/s at low frequencies (800 or 900 MHz). And all this while consuming less energy than conventional devices that also operate in the LTE spectrum.

Classic use cases of narrowband IoT are therefore in the areas of smart metering, building automation and tracking, i.e. the tracking of objects. One conceivable scenario is the hourly or daily transmission of measured values ​​from an electricity meter in the basement of an apartment building. This does not require the transmission of large amounts of data or fast data transmission - but it does require good building penetration, which conventional mobile communications technology such as LTE does not provide due to its high frequency of up to 2,600 MHz.

In addition to very good building penetration, NB-IoT solutions have very low energy requirements. Other classic use cases are therefore in the areas of smart cities and logistics - i.e. use cases for which devices are installed in places that are difficult or not publicly accessible without an external power supply. If these have to be regularly maintained or, for example, batteries have to be replaced on site by a technician, this effort is justifiable for a few devices, but if there are several hundred or thousand devices involved, this approach no longer scales.