The mobile industry has agreed on technology standards for the emerging Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) market.
The new LPWA standard has been accepted by the 3GPP, the GSMA has announced.
Narrowband IoT, extended coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS) and LTE-machine type communication (LTE-MTC) all form part of the new standards and will be included in 3GPP Release 13. Standards are designed to cover all LPWA use cases.
Machinia Research estimates that the LPWA market will be worth $589 billion by 2020, or 47% of the total M2M market.
The GSMA said its mobile IoT initiative, which is supported by 27 major mobile operators, OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies, is now working to accelerate the development of LPWA solutions.
“This is an important step in enabling operators to deliver industry standard solutions by extending their existing high-quality managed networks, service platforms and world-class customer management capabilities,” GSMA acting director general Alex Sinclair said.
“The Low Power Wide Area market is a high-growth area of the Internet of Things and represents a huge opportunity in its development. A common and global vision will remove fragmentation, accelerate the availability of industry standard solutions and help the market to fulfil its potential.”