Market Trends of Narrowband IoT Enterprise Application Industry
This section covers the major market trends shaping the Narrowband IoT Enterprise Application Market according to our research experts:
Smart Metering Expected to Witness Significant Growth
- Smart metering is expected to witness significant growth for the NB-IoT application market. It is sub-segmented into smart water, smart gas, and smart electric. Smart meters are important elements for utility monitoring and billing and one of the main components of the smart cities. They ensure the most accurate energy bills. Smart metering is further expected to see NB-IoT being integrated into a broader set of products in the coming years, including home appliances, door locks, and smoke detectors.
- Deployment of smart metering systems provides solutions to curb energy wastage in the industry. Implementation of smart metering systems enables energy suppliers to continuously monitor electricity usage by employing smart meter systems at multiple points in the grid.
- The smart metering entity maintains and operates the smart meter data repository that processes, stores, and protects electricity consumption data used for consumer billing by Ontario's local distribution companies.
- In July 2019, a contract was signed between Smart meters company Landis+Gyr and German electric utility E.ON, to install one million smart electricity meters with NB-IoT communication technology, as well as a head-end system on the Gridstream Connect platform. The upgrade will allow end-consumers to improve the efficiency of energy usage.
- According to Pietro Fiorentini, approximately 8 million smart gas meters are installed in Italy, and 0.5 million commercial and industrial gas meter installations are all smart gas meters. About 22 million residential gas meters are expected to be converted to smart gas meters by 2021, as estimated by the company, with the aid of NB IoT infrastructure.
- Moreover, Shenzhen Gas, a prominent energy company, has partnered with China Telecom, Huawei and Goldcard Smart, to test the feasibility of NB-IoT gas meters to solve some of the challenges that the industry faces with the current smart gas meters.
- Government mandates in developed and developing countries, such as Iran, are expected to remain as the primary driver for the smart gas meter deployments. For instance, in Iran, the National Iranian Gas Company has launched a ‘smart gas meter’ project, which makes use of NB-IoT technology for installing 5,000 smart gas meters in the shrine city of Mashhad. Without nation-wide mandates, gas utilities are expected to introduce smart gas meters only for commercial and industrial customers with annual consumption of more than 1,500,000 kWh.
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North America Expected to Hold Significant Market Share
- North America is expected to hold a major market share for the NB-IoT application market owing to the early adoption of technologies such as IoT. Businesses in the US are investing billions into LTE network, smart cities projects such as Smart City Accelerator Program, also the presence of major players such as AT&T is able to generate significant revenue share from the region, which further aids to the growth of the market.
- Telecom operators initially deployed LTE-M networks in the region. In April 2019, AT&T, an American multinational telecom company, announced the launch of NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in the US. According to the company, the new network will be able to unlock the next wave of IoT connection, which will further showcase its major step towards 5G and massive IoT. Additionally, businesses also have more choices as the company offers both LTE-M and NB-IoT networks in the US and Mexico by ensuring carrier-grade security.
- Furthermore, In 2019, other players, like Orange, AT & T, and Swisscom, collaborated to launch their LTE-M roaming across their respective IoT networks. The objective of this collaboration is to enable IoT low power devices to operate on multiple networks across North America efficiently. This is suggestive of a step toward global standard development, which will lead to lowered costs and wider deployment in the region, thereby constituting the growth of the market in the region.
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