Lao Telecommunications Company (LTC) and Nokia Shanghai Bell (NSB) have expanded their partnership to encompass end-to-end solutions including NB-IoT, 5G development and cloud services, in addition to 2G/3G/4G network upgrades and coverage improvements. NSB says the contract makes it LTC’s first ‘full range of solutions’ supplier.
Vodafone Spain says its NB-IoT network is now available in eight cities, with 1,000 live NB-IoT cell sites covering Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Malaga, Santander, Seville and Zaragoza.
Russian online company Mail.ru Group has entered a partnership with WAVIoT to integrate their products for Industrial IoT, including the Tarantool IIoT platform and Waviot’s LPWA wireless base station network for collecting data from industrial sensors. Tarantool IIoT Data Hub software will be implemented on the Waviot base stations, each one capable of collecting data from up to two million devices within a 50km area.
The Australian government has taken a 15% equity stake in Thinxtra through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), as part of a drive to fund Thinxtra’s nationwide Sigfox-based LPWA IoT network rollout. Applications supported by the Thinxtra network include monitoring/reducing energy usage, water metering, soil monitoring for farming, and logistics, with coverage expected to reach 95% of the population by the end of the year, whilst existing Australian telco networks will reportedly be used for data backhaul. New South Wales-based Thinxtra – 42%-owned by New Zealand technology company Rakon – aims to connect 17 million devices by 2022, and claims to have partnered over 150 local businesses already.
Acer has begun to ‘aggressively’ focus on the IoT device/services market in Indonesia, IndoTelko reports. The vendor has recently launched IoT products in Indonesia including the Acer Water Monitor/Air Monitor and Acer CloudProfessor. Aimed at the education sector, CloudProfessor is an IoT starter kit that combines hardware, software and cloud services in one package. The starter kit comes with a mobile device with integrated IoT/cloud education applications supported by software from Acer, interconnectable with smartphones and tablets, designed to enable students to learn programming languages and create their own IoT/cloud projects.
M2M SIM cards connected over cellular networks in Ukraine have increased by almost ten times since 2010 to pass two million by end-June 2017, BizLiga reported. Kyivstar is reportedly the M2M market leader, connecting more than half of the SIMs currently in use, although its two main rivals’ user bases are also growing, as MTS Ukraine (Vodafone Ukraine) recently reported that its number of M2M SIMs grew by approximately 50% year-on-year whilst Lifecell claimed that its M2M subscriptions had doubled since 2015.
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