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China Telecom says it charges about 20 yuan (roughly $3) per year per NB-IoT connection.
China represents both a threat and an opportunity for U.S. technology companies. This week, we saw Google invest $550 million in China’s e-commerce provider JD.com while Qualcomm introduced new modems and reference designs for kids’ smartwatches based primarily on interest from the Chinese market.
The Chinese operators are using NB-IoT for smart cities as well as industrial and some smart home applications. In the interviews with Chinese operators, it sounds like the LTE Cat1M standard, which offers slightly higher data rates, might make more sense for consumer applications. One even suggests that the LTE Cat1M networks would be used to create a “premium” IoT network.
And so far, it seems that NB-IoT is cheap in China. China Telecom says it charges about 20 yuan (roughly $3) per year per NB-IoT connection. If you are thinking about putting an NB-IoT radio in every street light this sort of cost seems sustainable, especially for applications that may not generate huge amounts of money.China Telecom has also published a white paper that lays out how it has encouraged 30 different suppliers to produce 34 models of NB-IoT modules. The carrier said that by October of last year it had purchased half a million NB-IoT modules and reduced the price of each of them to $5. This is the threshold that many European carriers are also targeting for cellular Low-Power Wide-Area Network efforts.
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