5 Key takeaways from Smart City World Expo in Barcelona

The majority of 1oT's customer-facing team members were at Smart City World Expo in Barcelona last week. 1oT was part of the Estonian pavilion, which in total featured 11 Estonian companies.

During the week, we demonstrated how easy it is to swap carrier profiles on 1oT Terminal if you have 1oT eSIM. For demo purposes, we had arranged a drone from Skycorp, who uses cellular connectivity to control their drone.

The drone with eSIM proved to be intriguing for many, so we had lots of discussions around cellular connectivity and eSIM in the IoT sector. Here we try to summarise the main takeaways from the talks in Smart City World Expo 2019.

Companies still negotiate (yearly) new connectivity deals

Connectivity is not the primary function of any smart city solution provider. However, it is taking a lot of operational resources to handle, plus the end product and agreements reached with the connectivity providers might not be the best on the market. Connectivity is the bread and butter of 1oT; we have experience with a variety of different projects and an extensive network of carrier partners we can leverage. Let the professionals step in and act as your connectivity department.

Companies don't think about cellular connectivity

In smart city projects, the responsibility of finding a connectivity partner for the solution is often delegated to the buying party, meaning that the end-customer needs to go through the process of finding a carrier partner (usually a local telco). These projects often have long device life cycles, so committing to one partner might turn out to be impractical in the long run. 1oT eSIM will offer the same carrier options + the added flexibility of additional carriers if it becomes necessary at any stage of the project.

A lot of interest in NB-IoT (Cat-NB1) and LTE-M (Cat-M1)

This technology is ideal for some smart city use cases (smart trash bins, a variety of other sensors that are stationary and not sending a lot of data), but deploying a unified solution in different countries without fallback technology is not advised.

We noticed a lot of LoRa being used by Smart City solution providers

While LoRa is currently a good fit for Smart City solutions with its ultra-low power consumption and cost-effectiveness, NB-IoT and LTE-M are beginning to change this. LoRa needs gateways to be set up either by the Smart City Solution Provider, or there is a need to use third-party network providers. While the coverage is already built out in bigger cities, smaller towns are still lacking a reliable connection.

Once LPWAN roaming agreements are set in place, low power consumption, cheap modules, and excellent coverage will make NB-IoT and LTE-M the best option for Smart City solutions.

Figuring out Urban mobility is The topic for cities

A dedicated hall only for urban mobility is a sign that smart mobility is the topic on everybody's mind. As the leading connectivity provider for the eScooter market, 1oT has extensive knowledge to support scaling smart mobility solutions globally and deploying fleets in multiple regions simultaneously.

We want to thank EAS for inviting us to be part of the Estonian pavilion. 1oT’s Team enjoyed the company and exchanging ideas with other great startups.

But this is not the end of our conference season. In December we will be in Germany, as 1oT will attend Disrupt Berlin and also be part of two seminars where we introduce our eSIM offering.

On December 9th in Mannheim, there will be a DiggiTalk meetup organised by Startup Mannheim. RSVP here

On December 10th in Berlin, Factory Berlin is organizing an IoT Circle meetup. RSVP here

Contact us at sales@1oT.mobi, and we'll quickly and easily guide you through deploying one cellular connectivity solution for your global business.