South Korean operators KT and LG Uplus have signed a partnership agreement on narrowband NB-IoT networks. KT and LG Uplus plan to jointly launch NB-IoT services by the first quarter of 2017, The Korea Times reports. The NB-IoT network will initially cover the capital area and will later be expanded nationwide within the first half of next year.
"Cooperation with LG Uplus means a lot as we have concentrated on competition instead of creating a shared market," said Kim June-keun, SVP of KT's IoT business division. "As KT pushes for the high potential Internet of Small Things (IoST) business, we will continue to expand the range of cooperation with LG Uplus domestically and globally", June-keun added.
"LG Uplus has actively established IoT infrastructure for households, industries and the public sector," said Ahn Sung-jun, SVP of LG Uplus' converged home business. "Under our partnership with KT, we will establish the IoT ecosystem here and expedite market growth to boost the global competitiveness of domestic NB-IoT businesses", Sung-jun added.
Under the terms of the partnership agreement, the two companies will jointly source key IoT components such as chipsets, modules, embedded subscriber identity modules and devices and join IoT-related organizations both domestic and abroad.
KT and LG Uplus estimate the cooperation will also benefit more than 500 members of KT's GiGA IoT Alliance and LG Uplus' partners. Leveraging a narrow fraction of networks, NB-IoT supports data transmission within an 8-kilometer radius, slower than 150 kilobits per second. It has been widely adopted for smart city technologies such as smart streetlamps and smart energy metering devices, as well as for other IoT applications including building condition monitoring and ultra-fine particle detection systems, according to KT and LG Uplus.
KT and LG Uplus have pushed for these IoT applications based on their nationwide LTE networks. They have commercialized LTE-Machine (LTE-M) networks for relatively more general IoT applications. They said NB-IoT will work as a supplement to the LTE-M network for applications that demand low capacity and low energy consumption modules.
According to an LG Uplus representative, SK Telecom will need to deploy additional routers or base stations to cover underground and remote areas whereas LG Uplus alone already has about 170,000 routers nationwide to cover all those shadow areas. He also said that NB-IoT has up to 30 times the network output compared to the LoRa network, which is based on flexible access common spectrum.
The official said the KT-LG Uplus alliance will also have an advantage in pricing strategy as they will be able to achieve an economy of scale. "As our scale of component sourcing grows under the alliance, we expect the manufacturing price of NB-IoT chipsets to be cheaper than that of LoRa chips," he said. "Our partners will have greater competitiveness as they can produce modules and devices with cheaper chipsets", he added.
"KT and LG Uplus unilaterally denounced technologies of their counterpart even when they have not announced plans to make investments," SK Telecom said. "We think such a remark reflects their anxiety of being late in IoT investment", SK Telecom added.
