In May 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a document requiring that by the end of 2020, China's NB-IOT network would achieve universal coverage of the main urban areas of cities above the county level and in-depth coverage of key areas. Promote the transfer of 2G/3G Internet of Things to NB-IOT and other networks; create a batch of NB-IOT application benchmarking projects and NB-IOT million-level connected application scenarios. Driven by this, NB-IOT market will be pushed to a new round of growth.
NB-IOT: The rise of the billion-dollar market
With the development of mobile Internet, the communication between people is no longer limited by time and region, and the existing communication methods are no longer limited to text, pictures, videos and other multimedia data, and have been comprehensively improved. Especially with the rise of 5G, the transmission between people has become faster and more reliable.
However, if we only focus on the communication between people, it will not promote the whole society. However, once the communication between things and people and things is realized, the scale and industry driven by it will increase without limit.
With the application of 5G, it is not reliable to use 5G to connect and communicate with devices -- in the Internet of Things industry, data transmission volume, signal coverage area and other issues are the costs that operators have to consider. Although 5G has the characteristics of high speed and large capacity, it is followed by problems such as small coverage area and high price. Once 5G base station is built on a large scale, the cost will increase linearly. NB-IOT solves this problem successfully.
But for operators, the most fundamental reason for adopting NB-IOT is that NB-IOT provides signals through base stations or similar devices. To put it simply, operators do not need to rebuild infrastructure and related equipment, but simply place NB-IOT on existing base stations to achieve regional coverage.
In addition, NB-IOT has three other features:
1. Low power consumption: It is known that some NB-IOT terminals can stand idle for 10
2. High coverage: Based on 20dB gain, NB-IOT can not only cover a range of nearly 20KM (open area), but also signal part of traditional buildings.
3. Capacity: The same as 5G, 50,000 terminals can be connected simultaneously in a base station.
Under these bright spots, NB-IOT has one disadvantage: low speed, downward speed: greater than 160kbps, less than 250kbps; Upload rate: greater than 160kbps and less than 250kbps. But this rate is already sufficient for the transmission of a large number of IOT devices.
Meanwhile, in 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is pushing forward the construction of NB-IOT. In November 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued notice No. 52 of 2019, which is the seventh content in the notice, which further strengthens the position of NB-IOT.
Business opportunities in fragmented markets
There are some giants in this field, but for them, the world they are planning is based on a unified world, with unified technical standards and equipment for easy integration. But the development of the market does not start from "unification", but from fragmentation. The formation of any market starts from the fragmented market. With the market law of survival of the fittest, some enterprises are gradually eliminated in the process of development, while those enterprises that adapt to the market development can survive. In this process, enterprises will gradually increase and establish their own technical barriers and lower prices.
The global NB-IOT market is projected to reach $6.02 billion by 2025, with a CAGR of 34.9% from 2019 to 2025. For this market, although there are a large number of participants, the number of enterprises in each segment is not large due to their different directions. Therefore, the NB-IOT industry is still in a blue ocean for new entrants.
However, it is not so easy to enter this market -- the price of NB-IOT modules has reached the limit. For the newcomers, they must make breakthroughs in technology and price. This is not easy for newcomers.
Write at the end: The burgeoning NB-IOT
According to the data, 157 operators are investing in NB-IOT technology worldwide, and 106 of them have deployed or rolled out NB-IOT networks.
In China, the three operators have built more than 900,000 NB-IOT base stations, which have achieved wide coverage. Meanwhile, the NB-IOT connection Numbers of the three operators have exceeded 100 million, while the NB-IOT connection Numbers of China Mobile and China Telecom have both exceeded 40 million, and that of China Unicom has exceeded 10 million.
Under such a huge scale, China still vigorously promotes the development of NB-IOT industry. NB-IOT will become the "front guard" of the Internet of everything, providing strong support for the realization of digital economy and enabling social and economic development.
