Russian telecom PJSC Vimplecom Beeline has launched a trial zone in a residential area of Moscow, Russia in partnership with Ericsson. The trial will run on Ericsson equipment on Beeline’s Narrow Band (NB) IoT network and will test and highlight the impact of IoT solutions for city residents and nearby services, businesses, and infrastructure.
Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) radio technology standard reusing components from LTE, developed specifically on indoor coverage, low cost, long battery life, and high connection density.
The NB-IoT network (in the 800 MHz - Band 20 band) has advanced IoT capabilities. NB-IoT enables up to 10,000 connected devices per base station. Ericsson has installed two base stations in the one square kilometer trial zone.
The technology is deployed on LTE and optimized for the low-speed collection of telemetric data from meters. The low data speed rate is about 20/60kbps uplink/downlink. The network signal penetrates hard-to-reach places such as basements, water risers, and underground parking, which is beneficial for testing IoT devices, Ericsson told.
Artashes Sivkov, Executive Vice President, PJSC VimpelCom, says: "The pilot zone that we have created is a modern mobile project designed for testing advanced IoT solutions out of laboratories. 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, says: "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, optimizing of utility sector infrastructure, road safety and many others. The pilot area in Moscow is an important stage in our long-term cooperation with Beeline.”
Ericsson told that the solution developers can work with partners in the Maryino area – Moscow’s most populated district. The participants have special SIM cards to access the restricted network which is free of cost until the commercial launch, expected by the end of 2018.