China Unicom Shanghai has piloted “Smart Parking”, which it says is the first commercial application of LTE-M-based CloT technologies.
Designed to ease traffic and congestion, the system enables drivers to find the best available parking spots in the city through a mobile application. Parking stall detectors will periodically collect data and report the status to the server through LTE-M. The service is a typical application of LTE-M, according to Huawei.
"Huawei supports carriers' efforts in overcoming technical challenges encountered when entering vertical industries and helps them seize the vast potential opportunities," said William Wang, president of Huawei wireless frequency-division duplex (FDD) product line.
Compared with LTE, LTE-M – one of the key features of 4.5G – is said to increase in-depth coverage gain up to 100 times and numbers of connections by 1,000 times while the power consumption of the device is only 10%, said Huawei.
LTE-M requires 200KHz spectral resources and reuses existing network resources, which enable carriers to carry out rapid construction of LTE-M networks.
Huawei expects to deploy LTE-M commercially by 2016, ahead of its 5G deployment.
