Huawei Drives NB-IoT in New Zealand

Huawei Drives NB-IoT in New Zealand

Industry Players Meet in Auckland to Realize IoT Business Opportunities

Auckland, May 19: Huawei yesterday hosted the first Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Forum in New Zealand, bringing together a range of industry and academic experts to share their vision for a better connected world.

The shift to an ultra-broadband future and next generation mobile networks will provide the framework for widespread interconnectivity of devices, from the small and simple to the large and complex. Huawei believes that by 2025 there will be over 100 billion connections globally, known as the IoT.

The event was held at Auckland’s Viaduct Event Centre as part of Tech Week and opened by Mayor Len Brown who thanked Huawei for the company’s commitment to fostering innovation in the Auckland region and wider New Zealand.

Huawei South Pacific Region CMO Lim Chee Siong encouraged New Zealand business leaders, industry stakeholders, and agencies to start preparing for the future today.

“The New Zealand of 2025, or even 2020, will not be the same as the New Zealand of today,” he said. “The internet of things will be far bigger than anyone realises. Economic impact from the global IoT market by 2020 is estimated to be US$7.1 trillion, and this is a conservative projection. Of all the technology trends taking place right now, perhaps the biggest one is the internet of things; it’s the one that’s going to give us the most disruption, as well as the most opportunity over the next five years.”

Huawei New Zealand CEO Jason Wu said the IoT would benefit hugely from next generation networks, able to support massive numbers of connections, vast data levels and provide near ubiquitous coverage.

Many devices would be low-powered, requiring only intermittent data connections, but may be deployed in massive numbers, such as sensors for use by farmers which could report on the health of individual livestock, or soil conditions. Huawei believes those devices would benefit from carrier-grade and standards-based narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology – a low-cost solution which can deliver wireless, low-power and wide-area networks.

Complex sensors, such as those used in self-driving cars or healthcare applications would require far greater bandwidth and extremely low latencies to be effective. The breakthroughs required to enable these next-generation technologies are already emerging across both mobile and fixed line deployments.

Mr Wu said New Zealand was well placed to take advantage of IoT innovations.

“Huawei has been involved in many projects recently which have significantly advanced New Zealand’s broadband networks. Fibre and 4G are now widespread, and this month Huawei and Spark enabled New Zealand’s first 4.5G site, with speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second, in Christchurch. The IoT will offer enormous opportunities for a well-connected country to innovate and be at the forefront of this revolution.”

ENDS

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