Japan's KDDI and NTT DoCoMo and seven other operators are using Mobile World Congress 2017 to jointly advocate for the global deployment of LTE-M.
Australia's Telstra, EMEA operator Orange, Europe's Telefonica, the Netherlands' KPN, Canada's TELUS and the USA's Verizon and AT&T are all also supporting global deployment of the standard.
The operators are working to ensure that LTE-M supports roaming and standards-based local service delivery to enable IoT objects based on the standard to be designed for worldwide markets.
The operators are also independently engaged in activities including pilots and IoT Open Labs. KDDI, for example, is testing LTE-M in advance of plans to introduce the technology this year. The company already serves nine of the 10 utilities in Japan with IoT applications over its LTE network.
NTT DoCoMo has also committed to launching LTE-M and other LTE-based IoT technologies, and has already deployed various IoT services via its cellular network.
Telstra meanwhile recently announced plans to deploy CAT-M1 across its nationwide LTE network. The company is currently engaged in localized trials in two states in collaboration with Ericsson.
“LTE-M technology will connect, in a secure and scalable way, a wide variety of IoT devices and objects,” the operators said in a statement.
“[These include] smart utility meters, asset monitoring trackers, vending machines, alarm systems, fleet of vehicles, heavy equipment, mHealth, oil and gas monitoring and control, agriculture and wearables.”