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2017 Oil Boom Will Energize the Internet of Things |
ON World’s recently published study covers oil and gas Internet of Things technologies including MEMS, wireless mesh sensor networks, LPWA networks (e.g., Sigfox, LoRa, RPMA and LTE M1/NB1), and cloud IoT platforms. “An energy transformation is underway that will accelerate oil and gas production as well as adoption for Internet of Things technologies,” says Jeff Kreegar, ON World’s chief technologist. “The oil and gas industry is an early adopter of remote monitoring solutions as well as innovations for MEMS, wireless sensor networks and, more recently, LPWAN technologies such as Sigfox, LoRa, RPMA and LTE-M1/NB1. With oil prices starting to climb over the past quarter, the incoming U.S. administration is expected to boost oil production by as much 1 million barrels per day. Wireless sensor networks save infrastructure costs of up to 80% while accelerating the installation of instrumentation for wellhead monitoring, offshore platforms, pipeline surveillance and storage. For the past 18+ months, unlicensed LPWA technologies such as Sigfox, LoRa and RPMA have been advancing rapidly with nation-wide network rollouts and trials by major carriers worldwide. Since the 3GPP’s Release 13 in June, developers now have the option to use licensed LPWA standards such as LTE Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 (NB-IoT), technologies that are the foundation of Narrowband 5G IoT. LTE Cat-M1 supports two-way communications of up to 1 Mbps for battery powered nodes with a new power saving mode. The second, longer term option is Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), also called LTE Cat-NB1, provides carriers with long range, low node power, large node gateway densities with fast time to market capabilities by using existing LTE infrastructure. NB IoT will be deployed in-band and with unused resource blocks within a LTE carrier’s guard-band as well as standalone for dedicated spectrum deployments. The 3GPP’s IoT standards efforts is ongoing including a few key missing features such as support for multicast and positioning. The first LTE-M1/NB1 chips and modules have been announced by Altair, Gemalto, Qualcomm, Link Labs, Sequans, Sierra Wireless, Telit and u-blox. Trials are underway with infrastructure leaders such as Ericsson, Intel and Huawei with major carriers including AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, SK Telecom, SoftBank, NTT Docomo, Verizon and Vodafone. More information and a free executive summary for ON World’s recently published “Oil & Gas Wireless Sensor Networks” study is available from: http://www.onworld.com/oilandgasAbout ON World: About ON World: Media contact: Back to News
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