The NB-IoT forum mainly comprises mainstream operators, major equipment manufacturers, chip providers and terminal module manufacturers around the world.

As a major equipment manufacturer, ZTE will accelerate the development of the Cellular Network-based NB-IoT industry, help the forum promote and verify the NB-IoT technology, take part in and accelerate the development of innovative NB-IoT-related services and applications, and facilitate commercialization of NB-IoT, together with other members of the forum.

ZTE has been a major promoter of NB-IoT, the Low Power Wide Area Technology for the IoT industry. The IoT scenarios such as smart metering, ecological agriculture, intelligent parking, intelligent residential community and intelligent architecture require terminals with deep coverage, low power consumption and low cost in particular.

At present, the widely-used 2G/3G/4G, WLAN and other wireless technologies cannot meet the challenges of these IoT scenarios, while NB-IoT, which features narrowband based LTE technology with low power consumption, deep coverage and multi-connection, can. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an international organization for Standardization, plans to freeze and launch the NB-IoT Standards in June 2016.

As one of the most active contributors to the NB-IoT Standards, ZTE worked closely with its peers on technical research and standardization and invested heavily to contribute massively to essential air interface technologies such as communication channel design, short code, multi-connection and ultra-low power consumption.

With the development of smart, mobile and cloud technologies, multiple forms of smart terminals have been applied. It is estimated that the global number of connections will reach 100 billion by 2020.

NB-IoT will help operators address the challenge and meet the inter-connection needs of “thing-to-thing”, so it will be a major trend for telecom operators to follow. Based on NB-IoT, ZTE offers end-to-end solutions for operators and the industry and has actively invested in the research on chips, terminals, systems and IoT platforms to help operators realize the 100 billion connections.