There will be more than 100 billion IoT connections by 2025, predicts Huawei. The company recently shared its vision of the IoT with over 200 attendees at the inaugural Huawei IoT Ecosystem Forum, held in conjunction with CommunicAsia2017 last week.
Low power wide area (LPWA) networks such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) running on licensed spectrum will represent approximately 70% of cellular IoT connections, Huawei predicted. Today NB-IoT is already powering industry applications such as asset tracking, agriculture and parking.
While the massive number of connections is expected to enable significant productivity gains for companies and individuals, IoT will need the support of the entire ecosystem to reach its full potential.
Lim Chee Siong, chief strategy and marketing officer of Huawei Southern Pacific region highlighted in his opening speech that Huawei will support the IoT ecosystem by focusing on three areas.
These are building wireless network, enterprise IoT gateways and home IoT routers; providing a cloud-based IoT connection management platform, which realizes secured and reliable IoT connections; and innovating IoT chipsets, with built-in LiteOS, to make communication and connection in the IoT environment with ease.
“We will work to develop a cohesive IoT ecosystem, which all partners and telcos can leverage as they address the IoT needs of different vertical industries,” said Lim.
To drive innovation and glocalisation of technology services in Singapore, Huawei announced its partnership with i5Lab with NUS enterprise in November 2017 to accelerate the growth of IoT startups in Singapore.
The collaboration aims to cater to the industry's needs for incubation of innovative ideas, training, research support, funding, testing and certification in the region.
Huawei president of IoT solutions Jiang Wang Cheng commented that "We believe that IoT is a 'GLocal' ecosystem where telcos, local enterprises and global vendors like Huawei leverage on each others' knowledge and capabilities to build a vibrant ecosystem. Huawei is glad to recommend our partners in different industries and establish channels of communication between operators and vertical industries. We call for more partners from across different verticals to join us to build viable IoT solutions.”
Huawei is currently working with more than 40 partners on smart meter, smart light and connected car to offer IoT device, network, service platform, applications and system integration. In March 2017, Huawei announced plans to invest US$1 billion in developer ecosystem worldwide.