China the world’s largest IoT market, GSMA confirms

By connecting the estimated 960 million devices via cellular networks, the country is realising the value of the IoT and transforming society through mass market deployments of smart home, smart industry and smart city solutions.
According to GSMA Intelligence, China is the world’s largest IoT market, boasting 64 per cent of the 1.5 billion global cellular connections including the rapidly growing Mobile IoT licensed LPWA technologies2.
“Backed by proactive government support, China is now at the forefront in the development and mass deployment of innovative and transformative IoT-based solutions based on Mobile IoT technology,” said Alex Sinclair, GSMA’s chief technology officer. “These new technologies are being implemented across multiple different vertical sectors fundamentally altering the way we live and work, delivering real-time information and making our cities smarter and our lives easier and more productive.”
However, there are a wide variety of different examples of large scale deployments in China across a number of different sectors. For example, Sunsea AIoT with its partner, China Telecom has installed more than 500,000 NB-IoT sensors covering 37 kilometres in the Jing’an District, turning the area into a truly smart community. The devices monitor fire hydrant water pressure sensors as well as gas and smoke detectors and environmental monitors. Connected manhole covers also monitor gases and underground assets. An integrated platform centralises, monitors and analyses the data to help with real-time improvements. China Mobile has installed more than 100,000 NB-IoT intelligent fire alarm systems including fire alarms, temperature sensors, and smoke and gas detectors across China while China Unicom has installed 25,000 gas and water meters utilising an NB-IoT solution that combines the IoT with big data to make energy management more intelligent.