ZTE Corporation, a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, and Velcom, a branch of A1 Telekom Austria Group, jointly announced the deployment of the first scaled commercial Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) network in Belarus. The network was deployed in Minsk city first and then in other regions accordingly as scheduled. So far, Velcom has verified smart metering and smart city solutions in the network.
The cooperation of NB-IoT between Velcom and ZTE has started since the end of last year. In April's Tibo exhibition, the end-to-end gas metering service demo has been successfully demonstrated. Following that, more lab tests and field tests were carried out.
Velcom has highly appreciated ZTE's commitment in this market. "We are very excited that, with ZTE, we have provided abundant services to our customers. Within the project, we installed equipment that will allow us to implement NB-IoT technology. This is an incredible breakthrough in the field of telecommunications, and we are happy to complete it together. We are sincerely glad to have such a partnership and looking forward to further cooperation." said Mr. Christian Laque, CTO of Velcom.
Mr. Pu Yingchun, Vice President of ZTE and General Manager of FDD Products, said: "ZTE is very proud to work with Velcom to release the first NB-IoT commercial deployment overseas. The achievement signifies ZTE's capabilities of providing operators with the smooth evolution solution towards 5G."
Velcom is one of the leading mobile operators in Belarus dedicated to providing customers with the cutting-edge communication services. It started its 3G network rollouts in March 2010. In February 2016, Velcom was the first to launch UMTS-900 throughout the whole country, bringing dramatic coverage extension and high mobile data quality.