[Shenzhen, China, April 5, 2017] On March 30, China Telecom and Huawei co-convened a symposium in Shenzhen to strengthen the understanding of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) application to Smart City, particularly focusing on public service provisioning. The symposium had invited participants from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and over 100 renowned enterprises from the industries of water, gas, meter manufacturing, platform, and other associated fields in China. The symposium was ultimately very successful and provided interested parties an opportunity to fully discuss on how NB-IoT applications improve the public service provisioning capabilities of Smart City and the construction of the NB-IoT-based Smart City ecosystem.

Smart City is not merely a buzzword in city development, but is leading the way for transforming cities into a secure and convenient place where people live a greener life under highly-efficient city governance. NB-IoT boosts Smart City acceptance, especially in terms of public service provisioning, by functioning as a strong technological foundation. NB-IoT offers wide coverage and massive connections, delivering highly reliable services with low power consumption. Such characteristics promote NB-IoT as an ideal solution for extensive deployment to accommodate public service provisioning in Smart City areas. These public services include water and gas management, street lighting, and car parking.

Sun Jian, Deputy General Manager of Government and Enterprise Customer Department of China Telecom, commented,

"NB-IoT-based Smart Water and Smart Gas are the main components in Smart City, fully exhibiting the informatization level in the public service provisioning sector of a city. China Telecom and Huawei have initiated together pilot NB-IoT applications on Smart Water and Smart Gas with industry partners, including Shenzhen Water and Shenzhen Gas. Through comprehensive cooperation on standards formulation, technological research, network construction, service development, business model exploration, and associated aspects, all parties wish to jointly promote informatization construction for water and gas industries."

Sun Jian, Deputy General Manager of Government and Enterprise Customer Department of China Telecom, delivering a speech

China Telecom spares no efforts to support the ecosystem construction. A multitude of measures have been applied to ripen the terminal industry chain, including advancing module standardization, opening up lab capabilities, and offering subsidies on modules. Open platforms have additionally been established to shorten the new service incubation duration.

Zhang Shunmao, President of Huawei Marketing & Solutions, Products and Solutions, indicated,

"Huawei proprietary NB-IoT-capable terminal chips now support large-scale commercial use. In April, Huawei supports shipment of 200,000 such chips. This number is expected to increase to 1 million per month."

Zhang Shunmao, President of Huawei Marketing & Solutions, Products and Solutions, delivering a speech

NB-IoT has been well proven and become a mainstream IoT technology. Huawei has established long-term relationships with operators on IoT standards research. Dedicated R&D for technological development has been performed to deal with the four major IoT facing challenges: power consumption, coverage, connection, and security. An IoT interconnection management platform catering to application protocols of various industries has been established and is subject to continuous optimization. All-round security guarantee measures are also available.

Huawei regards IoT as a long-term strategy and is currently the only vendor which provides offering of chips, access network devices, and IoT cloud platform. In 2017, Huawei is scheduled to deploy more than 30 NB-IoT networks for Smart City (particularly for public service provisioning) in over 20 countries globally.

At the symposium, China Telecom, Shenzhen Water, and Huawei jointly released the NB-IoT Smart Water Meter White Paper. This White Paper elaborates on the world's first commercial NB-IoT-based Smart Water project launched by the three parties, in terms of major challenges, solutions, practices, and prospects. The three parties hope that the release of this White Paper could assist water industry operators in realizing smart transformation and offer greater value to digital construction of Smart City.

Release ceremony for NB-IoT Smart Water Meter White Paper