The Wireless IoT Forum has asked telecom regulators such as Ofcom and the FCC to dedicate bandwidth for monetizing the Internet of Things networks and services.
The telecom industry association wants regulators to dedicate bands in the range 800MHz-1000MHz to IoT applications for overcoming interference issues.
Recently, a survey by IDC said 73 percent of respondents have already deployed IoT solutions or plan to deploy in the next 12 months.
56 percent of retail and 53 percent of manufacturing respondents are showing high awareness of the IoT.
58 percent consider the IoT a strategic initiative, 24 percent views IoT as transformative, said IDC. The healthcare industry leads the field with 72 percent of respondents identifying IoT as strategic, followed by transportation and manufacturing at 67 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Government lags behind in overall awareness.
But the main challenge on the way of the IoT growth is the fact that available bands do not meet the needs of IoT deployment. Power restrictions can be challenging. Since spectrum is fragmented and interference levels can be high because any type of applications and technologies can use the bands, said the IoT industry forum.
On top of this, traffic on an IoT network has to go through a small number of base stations or network relay points and these are subject to the same regulatory constraints as any other device operating in unlicensed spectrum.
Wide-area IoT networks will results in thousands of IoT devices per cell.
Cells will need:
# sufficient power to deliver a range of up to 5km
# ability to have an uplink / downlink balance that is flexible, extending to applications that are predominantly downlink as well as those that are predominantly uplink
# reasonable freedom from interference
# a small number of frequencies spanning a relatively narrow band that are available globally
“We would like to see telecom regulators dedicate bands in the range 800MHz-1000MHz to IoT applications, thus overcoming interference issues. Where IoT is deployed in general purpose unlicensed bands we would like to see light licensing approaches for base stations removing duty cycle restrictions and enabling higher power levels,” said William Webb, CEO of Wireless IoT Forum.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
