MediaTek and ZTE have completed the first certification of NB-IoT R14 for commercial applications, suggesting that the NB-IoT R14 specification is now ready to enter the large-scale commercial deployment phase with mature products to be introduced for a wide variety of applications. The companies said they have jointly finished the high-speed testing of NB-IoT R14 Cat-NB2 specification with uplink/downlink data rates of over 150/100kbps as compared to 60/21kbps of R13.
CAT-NB2 is well suited for Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA), Voice over Message, and other applications that require high data transmission rate with minimum delay.
The company explained the benefits of NB-IoT R14 specification over R13 standard. The R14 specification can achieve over 100kbps uplink and downlink peak data rates by using larger transport blocks (2536 bits TBS) and the 2HARQ process. It also said that the uplink/downlink peak rates of the R13 standard can no longer meet the increasing demand for more and more IoT applications on the market.
Moreover, the NB-IoT R14 has also been enhanced in terms of mobility, positioning, multicasting, and multi-carrier technologies
These benefits are hoped to further provide better standards and technical support for the development of the IoT.
“NB-IoT is a key technology for the Internet-of-Things era,” said Jerry Yu, MediaTek Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Home Entertainment Business Group. “After completing the preliminary development of the technology and ecosystem, NB-IoT will enter the commercial phase in 2018 with mature products to be introduced for a wide variety of applications.
At the moment, MediaTek’s two chips that support the NB-IoT R14 specification are the single-mode MT2625 and the GSM+NB-IoT dual-mode MT2621. The MT2625 is planned to enter mass production aimed at commercial applications.
MediaTek also just announced, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018, its collaboration with China Mobile to develop 5G terminals for pre-commercial launch next year.
MediaTek will showcase wearable devices equipped with both the MT2625 and MT2621 chipsets at the 2018 MWC.
For additional details on MT2625 and MT2621, click here.
