Under the new deal, enterprise customers of Telefonica and China Unicom will be able to offer IoT services in China, Europe and Latin America
Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica and China Unicom have signed an agreement in the field of internet of things (IoT). Under the partnership, the two operators will have access to each other networks and deploy their IoT services allowing their enterprise customers to use IoT technologies and accelerate the deployment of global IoT connectivity solutions in their businesses.
Customers of Telefónica and China Unicom will be able to deploy IoT products and services in China, Europe and Latin America with a single global IoT SIM card. Using a unified IoT connectivity management platform they will be able to control connections globally and to localize IoT SIMs once they reach a geography (subscription swap), complying with GSMA standards.
“We are leveraging IoT technologies to accompany our customers on their digital transformation journey, where IoT has a very important role to play. Simplifying massive IoT deployments is key and therefore we are strengthening our ecosystem of partners. Our partnership with China Unicom will strengthen Telefónica’s capability to meet our global customer needs,” said Vicente Muñoz, chief IoT officer at Telefónica.
The executive said that enterprise customers of both companies will be able to enjoy these new IoT capabilities later this year.
In related news, Swedish vendor Ericsson has completed the deployment of the first cellular NB-IoT clusters in Greek telco COSMOTE’s 4G network in eleven Greek cities.
German telco Deutsche Telekom owns 40% of the stock in the Greek telco.
Under the terms of the contract, Ericsson upgraded part of the COSMOTE LTE network with software that supports NB-IoT technology, enabling massive IoT use cases.
As part of the NB-IoT deployment, Ericsson and COSMOTE aim to develop use cases and build the local ecosystem. In collaboration with local partner Fuelics, and using Ericsson IoT Accelerator platform, the companies designed, tested and introduced a new NB-IoT use case using COSMOTE’s commercial network for asset management – fuel tank capacity monitoring – at the Democritus University of Thrace.
COSMOTE is also working with wine monitoring start-up ISTMOS, to offer a solution which monitors every wine bottle from the winery to the end consumer.
“NB-IoT will accelerate the development of the IoT market in Greece and open up vast opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in many industries, such as transport and healthcare, resulting in new services that will significantly improve quality of life,” said George Pappas, Head of Ericsson Greece.
During a press conference at the 2018 Mobile World Congress, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, last week, Deutsche Telekom’s board member for technology and innovation, Claudia Nemat said that the firm currently offers this technology in Germany and seven additional markets across Europe including Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece.
She added that the telco currently has nearly 200 customers in the NB-IoT segment.
