There are 5.000 municipalities that will be able to use the new generation services of the Internet of Things. In fact, TIM is ready to offer, as the first operator in Italy, the IoT commercial service based on LTE technology, thanks to the diffusion of Narrowband technology which from the end of October will be available in over 75% of TIM's 4G network, which will be completed within the next January.
This is an important new milestone, after the one achieved last April, when TIM – first in Italy and among the first in Europe – field tested the first intelligent water meter capable of automatically sending measurements via the live network NB-IoT, experimentation carried out by Olivetti, the digital hub of the TIM Group, with SMAT, Società Metropolitana Acque Torino SpA. The availability of the NB-IoT service throughout the country, made possible by TIM's technological acceleration, will enable commercial development of services starting from smart meters which will allow not only real-time monitoring of consumption and remote management of the gas, water and electricity transport and distribution networks, but also district heating and environmental management.
Anticipating some of the capabilities allowed by future 5G networks, the NB-IoT technology allows - through a standard specified for the Internet of Things usage functions - significant savings in consumption with a battery life of the connected objects of over ten years and significant increases in radio coverage up to seven times greater than GSM. Thanks to this latter feature, the NB-IoT update on the entire TIM LTE network, which already covers over 97% of the Italian population, will make the service available throughout the country by January, even in areas where coverage is not it is always optimal as understairs, manholes, underground rooms, cellars or garages.
Furthermore, the NB-IoT technology makes it possible to optimize the costs of the connected objects and guarantees the security and reliability typical of mobile networks on licensed spectrum. TIM contributes to the development of a complete and mature ecosystem, testing chipsets and intelligent objects of the main players, to guarantee the market full interoperability with its network and making the Turin Open Lab available to all partners in the sector to integrate these device and make the objects of the Internet of Things intelligent. TIM's NB-IoT Open Lab, inaugurated last November and unique in Italy, has so far involved 110 companies with 39 active collaborations, of which 12 validation activities have already been completed.
NB-IoT constitutes the first and fundamental network technological innovation dedicated to the Internet of Things on which TIM with Olivetti is developing a rich portfolio of offers; this will be followed by other IoT solutions that will be able to fully exploit the speed and low latency of LTE/5G networks, such as industrial automation or the interconnection between cars and infrastructures, to make possible the evolution towards autonomous driving scenarios, confirming the leadership of the TIM group in digital innovation.
