IoT Test Bed
LGU + and Huawei, the largest telecom equipment maker in China, have teamed up to expand the internet of things (IoT) market. They want to create the NB-IoT (Narrow Band-IoT) market that both companies are developing.
On November 21, LG U+ held a press conference at LG U+ Seoul Sangam Building together with Huawei and unveiled NB-IoT Open Lab. NB-IoT Open Lab will open to partners in a variety of fields including terminal, service solution and system integration companies. The lab provides various functions to develop and test NB-IoT technology and services.
LG U+ and Huawei will lay the foundation for building the NB-IoT market infrastructure by providing 100,000 NB-IoT chipsets and modules to their partners free of charge through NB-IoT Open Lab. They aim to make people use 100,000 Huawei modules in Korea. It is said that they decided to do so as they judged that Korea’s test bed could be a bridgehead for Huawei to invade global markets.
“Since Korea has a great global capability in the IoT industry, we judged that if we succeed in creating an IoT ecosystem in Korea, we could succeed in other countries as well.” We chose LG U+,” said Zhou Cheng, CEO of Cellular IoT Product Line at Huawei said. “Thus, we decided to provide chipsets to LG U+ free of charge.”
Commercial terminals and services with NB-IoT technology will be launched in April next year. They are expected to be used in the future smart city business such as gas, water and electricity meter readings and location tracking equipment. LG U + and Huawei will introduce NB-IoT-based gas and water meters to the market, starting with environmental sensors loaded with NB-IoT ahead of others. They are planning to cooperate with city gas companies, local governments and K Water across the whole country to enable remote meter readings.
SK Telecom which competes with LG U+ announced that it will distribute 100,000 Lora modules by the end of this year. LG U+ emphasized that NB-IoT can sufficiently fill its gap with SK Telecom’s Lora. “The time difference of several months is not quite meaningful. The price of the module is more competitive than that of Lora,” said Ahn Sung-joon, head of the IoT Business Division at LG U+.
Security issues are expected to hinder cooperation between LG U+ and Huawei. LG U+ also uses Huawei equipment in its current long term evolution (LTE) equipment.
However, the US government officially requested that Huawei equipment should not be used for LTE networks around US military bases, pointing out security problems of Chinese telecommunications equipment.
In particular, there is a concern that security controversy will arise about LG U+ and Huawei IoT cooperation with controversy surrounding IoT hacking and China’s collection of various personal information.
“NB-IoT's core equipment was developed with domestic technology and designed to be used with network security equipment, which was also made with domestic technology," said Cho Chang-gil, director of network strategy at LG U+.