Delivering international IoT services through cellular connectivity

As part of the national development plan, China embraced its “One Belt, One Road” initiative to revive and digitalize economies along the Silk Road from China to Europe. By focusing on cloud computing and propelling new IoT applications, the nation is gaining traction at the forefront of IoT opportunities. For China Telecom, this IoT focus is taking shape as a national and global strategy.

Ericsson forecasts that China will continue to constitute more than half of the world’s cellular IoT connections, with more than 2 billion connections by 2024. China’s booming IoT growth spans industrial IoT (IIoT) applications such as smart grid applications, smart homes, smart healthcare, connected vehicles and other fields. For one, new IoT scenarios are constantly emerging and domestic customer requirements continue to grow. Secondly, due to China’s increasing openness with the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, many Chinese companies are looking to opportunities brought about by global expansion. China Telecom knows it needs to play a key role in providing international IoT services for Chinese enterprises, in addition to enhancing its domestic capabilities.

• China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative to digitalize Silk Road economies from China to Europe has become a driving factor for international business growth.
• China Telecom wanted to position itself to meet the growing demand of Chinese enterprises for IoT services, and turned to Ericsson for its trusted expertise as well as its IoT Accelerator platform to easily support both domestic and international initiatives.
• With Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator platform, China Telecom gains a global, unified service architecture which ensures visibility across a common view of access networks and devices, as well as reliable connectivity for enterprise customers.
• Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator will serve as a foundational piece of China Telecom’s IoT blueprint for focusing on international partnerships and supporting their customers’ digital transformations.

China Telecom launched its global connection management platform to accelerate the deployment of IoT solutions and services, fitting perfectly with China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy. Powered by Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator, the platform is employed by hundreds of enterprise customers in various industries, including automotive, media, industrial and financial services.

As a trusted, longstanding technology partner, Ericsson has been cooperating with China Telecom for many years. In IIoT, the service provider decided to work with Ericsson due to its rich experience in global IoT business. Its IoT Accelerator platform provides a global unified service architecture that supports China Telecom’s international IoT goals, while offering enterprise customers reliable connectivity based on service-level agreements and a common, unified overview of devices and access networks.

China Telecom enables enterprises to deploy, control and scale IoT device management through partnerships. With this solution, enterprise customers integrate their business processes with the managed connectivity service offered by China Telecom to create highly reliable IoT solutions.

To date, the service provider has onboarded more than 400 enterprises and provisioned more than 10 million connections. China Telecom has also teamed up with Ericsson with the intent of further accelerating the development of commercial 5G and promoting 5G technological innovation. China Telecom and its industry customers use the platform to drive the digital transformation of industries in China and beyond.