The recently held IoT Asia conference and exhibition in Singapore between March 21 and March 22 for the first time witnessed the IoT longest event led by two telecommunication operators Singtel and M1. Both the firms have already ridden the wave of cellular telephony in technological-attributed city and state, where there are 150% mobile penetration rates, which means phones are more than people in the region. Both the companies now understand that potential of opportunities in terms of people and things.

The current cellular networks are mainly intended to manage data traffic of consumer and voice calls over the applications with lower bandwidth and normally linked with IoT. Dedicated efforts are been made since last some years to create LPWANs (Low Power Wide Area Networks) that has durable battery life, marks boxes that signify low cost and extensive range coverage. These all parameters are crucial for IoT applications; here the count of the devices are calculated in thousands and spread across the huge geographic regions.

In the world of licensed spectrum, the important LPWAN technologies are LTE CAT-M1—in higher bandwidth—and NB-IoT. The alternative LPWAN technologies set also exists such as Sigfox and LoRa in the non-cellular world.

Singtel, just 3 weeks back, declared about the commercial launch of cellular LPWA network nationwide, which copes well with both CAT-M1 and NB-IoT devices. The trials have been conducted by Singtel at the IoT innovation lab in the previous year with Ericsson, its technology partners in terms of IoT. Singtel has also collaborated with EDMI Limited, a smart metering solutions provider to build smart electric metering infrastructure-based on Cat-M1 in Singapore.

The global players in the telecom sector are aggressively knocking every opportunity that is served on the basis of technology.