Nokia has announced a partnership with energy company EDF to test the performance of LPWA technology for IoT use in industrial settings.
EDF’s R&D team in France will make use of ‘TestHub Services’ in Nokia’s device testing lab. The lab claims to offer carrier-grade wireless infrastructure for testing IoT/M2M objects, chipsets, modules, and user devices across all wireless technologies and frequencies.
Stéphane Tanguy, Head of IT Systems, EDF R&D, said:
“The Internet of Things offers tremendous opportunities for our group. Many use cases can be enabled by IOT technologies in various businesses from power generation to marketing. As the R&D engine of the EDF Group, it is our responsibility to characterize the objects, their connectivity, their integration into IoT platforms and the related end-to end cybersecurity properties.
Among the connectivity solutions, it is essential that we understand the performance, the maturity and the adequacy of each technology for our different use cases by an objective and agnostic approach. The cellular IOT technologies (LTE-M and NB-IOT) are two major technologies that we have decided to test with Nokia, which provides us with a very interesting test environment and valuable expertise to carry out these evaluations."
The advantage for EDF is the ability for devices to be tested on a real network infrastructure, instead of a simulated network. When real-world deployments begin, this should help to reduce or eliminate any problems from occurring.
Matthieu Bourguignon, European Head of Global Enterprise and Public Sector at Nokia, comments:
“The use of IoT devices in industrial networks is in its infancy, but given the expected huge numbers of devices that will be deployed in the future, it is critical that our customers can evaluate now the various technologies before making substantial investments.
Nokia's Device Testing Lab, staffed by some of the most experienced wireless networking experts in the industry, will make it much easier for EDF to evaluate the performance of LPWA against other emerging technologies and reduce the risk of future deployments."
The announcement was made less than a week after Nokia announced a similar partnership with Deutsche Telekom and Hamburg Port to test industrial IoT deployments.
What are your thoughts on the partnership? Let us know in the comments.
