The commercial inter-carrier arrangement for NB-IoT roaming broadens collaboration between leading carriers, laying the groundwork for millions of global internet of things (IoT) connections. It creates the largest NB-IoT footprint in the world.
It will include the country-wide NB-IoT network for AT&T in the US and the Vodafone networks in Spain, Germany, Italy, UK and the Netherlands. It will be available to customers by the end of 2019.
“Extending our collaboration with AT&T to offer NB-IoT roaming helps our customers to easily deploy their connected devices between the US and Europe,” said Vinod Kumar, CEO of Vodafone Business.
“We want to make technology adoption simpler for our customers to help them achieve their business outcomes and by pushing forward the standards and linking up our IoT network with AT&T’s, we’re doing just that.”
NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network designed specifically for IoT devices that require long battery life, high-signal penetration and low data volumes.
This network arrangement enables companies to take advantage of the unique network features of NB-IoT, simplifying their supply chain and facilitating seamless operations across multiple networks with a single highly secure SIM.
“For the IoT to live up to its promise, it must be global,” added Chris Penrose, senior vice president of advanced mobility and enterprise solutions at AT&T. “More and more of our enterprise customers are launching IoT applications across multiple countries. Working with Vodafone we can offer our customers simplified deployments to help scale their IoT plans across the U.S. and Europe.”
This collaboration builds on the previous announcement in February that AT&T and Vodafone Business are offering LTE-M roaming across their respective networks in the US and the Netherlands.
Both carriers are committed to expanding their NB-IoT and LTE-M roaming footprints globally to put LPWA on a similar global footprint to 4G. NB-IoT and LTE-M are also expected to be included in the global standards for 5G massive IoT.
