KT plans to invest $130 million to develop a new NB-IoT network, positioning it for national availability for IoT and M2M use in South Korea.
KT said the NB-IoT solution targets the Internet of Small Things (IoST) and will be offered with about 100,000 IoST sensor modules for developers, with the modules free during their first year. KT also plans to use LTE-M technology to support M2M communication for a future collective IoT, and it will run commissioning tests toward the end of the year. Kim Juin-Keun, KT s senior vice president, said the aggressive investment is intended to grow the number of connected IoST modules to 4 million by 2018.
KT further stated that it aims to become the first mobile telecommunications operator in the world to launch a national NB-IoT network. It said IoST sensors would collect information and transmit small amounts of data to save electricity, and that it expects IoST applications to extend beyond smart home into industrial automation and security, while working with SMEs to expand use cases. IoT connectivity solutions are often built to handle this kind of low-power, small-payload data pattern, including device onboarding and ongoing connectivity across use cases. KT said it is backing LTE-M because it is more stable than other IoT technologies such as Sigfox and LoRa and is not affected by interference-related degradations, while also cautioning that LTE-M is not yet standardized; it also predicted IoST device and use-case growth into the millions over the coming years.