Chinese institutions China Unicom Shanghai, China Unicom Research Institute and kit vendor Huawei have developed a collaborative partnership to develop a pilot of cellular IoT (CIoT).

Based on Huawei’s “4.5G” LTE service for machine to machine communications (LTE-M), the carrier has rolled out a trial mode of what it refers to as “Smart Parking”, and claims it to be the first commercial application of commercial LTE-based cellular IoT. Smart Parking is intended to help ease traffic and parking congestion in dense urban areas with intelligent sensors across the city. Drivers can search for available parking bay using a mobile app, and has been trialled in Shanghai

According to Huawei, LTE-M will help the operator accelerate the progression of its IoT strategy in response the governmental plan, called “Internet Plus”. It claims LTE-M uses minimal spectrum resources, just 200KHz, while generating more than 100 times coverage than LTE, and is able to accommodate more than 1000 times more connections.

As a result, Huawei’s president of wireless FDD, William Wang, reckons LTE-M will be ideally positioned to help carriers roll out timely LTE-M networks for broader adoption and development of IoT.

“Huawei supports carriers’ efforts in overcoming technical challenges encountered when entering vertical industries and help them seize the vast potential opportunities,” he said. “LTE-M will be commercialised globally in 2016. We have already collaborated extensively with carriers in China, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.”

Meanwhile, Huawei has also confirmed its participation in a range of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 projects, as recently covered by Telecoms.com, including METIS-II, FANTASTIC-5G and mmMAGIC, as well as 5G-Xhaul and 5G Exchange – the latter two covering optical backhaul advances for the RAN, and orchestration for software defined networks. The projects fall under the broader remit of the 5GPPP, and Dr. Wen Tong, Huawei’s Wireless CTO, sees the collaborative efforts as the only way 5G will really progress.

“5G is the standard that will take us into the era of ‘smart everything’,” he said. “This will create vast business opportunities while enhancing quality of life on a number of levels. Building fruitful alliances will be key to bringing us closer to transforming our vision of 5G into a global standard. Europe has huge potential for boosting 5G development by federating efforts and the 5GPPP is a good illustration of this approach.”