NEWSBYTE Telecoms equipment maker Ericsson has launched a trial NB-IoT network in a heavily populated residential area of Moscow, in partnership with Russian telecoms operator, PJSC Vimplecom Beeline.
The trial will use Ericsson equipment on Beeline’s Narrow Band (NB) IoT network to test and highlight the impact of IoT solutions for city residents and nearby services, businesses, and infrastructure.
The trial is taking place in the Maryino area – Moscow’s most populous district – and will span utilities, social services, environmental monitoring, small businesses, and local community and civic organisations.
Restricted network
According to Ericsson, users will have special SIM cards to access the restricted network. Access is free until the commercial launch, which is expected by the end of this year.
The trial will enable connections of up to 10,000 devices per base station, and Ericsson has installed two stations in the one-kilometre trial zone. The network is provisioned across the 800 MHz 20 band.
The technology is deployed on LTE and enhanced for the low-speed collection of telemetric data from meters. The low-data speed rate is about 20/60kbps uplink/downlink. Ericsson said the network signal penetrated hard-to-reach places, such as basements, water risers, and underground parking areas – all useful for testing IoT devices.
“The pilot zone that we have created is a modern mobile project designed for testing advanced IoT solutions out of laboratories,” said Artashes Sivkov, executive vice president, PJSC VimpelCom. “We are eager to empower business to study, test, identify, and eliminate errors in the product by testing it in a real urban environment.”
Marcus Lindqvist, business development for Ericsson’s VimpelCom account, said that NB-IoT technologies “open up wide opportunities” for the development of industrial and consumer use cases in different areas: smart housing, smart manufacturing, environmental improvement, optimising of utilities sector infrastructure, road safety, and many others.
“The pilot area in Moscow is an important stage in our long-term cooperation with Beeline,” he added.
Internet of Business says
With the US, Europe, China, and India so often at the centre of technology rollout stories, Russia is less often covered, and so it is easy to assume that it is somehow outside of the same global trends. Its partnerships with Western companies prove that this is not the case – and it must be grateful that the current trade war between the US and China has shifted the focus elsewhere for the time being.