IoT Landscape and Role of MediaTek

IoT technology has a huge potential, we have experienced a small part of it, yet the complete automation is pending. The IoT revolution is almost ready; soon we would live in a world where every machine will communicate with each other. MediaTek is working closely to produce IoT devices, we discussed with Anku Jain, MD, MediaTek India to understand the IoT landscape.

IoT landscape and development

According to Anku, for IoT, we can roughly break it up into two parts. One is what we are doing already so we have been there in M2M like smart metres and prepaid metres so on, those are traditional applications of IoT. IoT is any device which is Internet-enabled so our traditional strengths like multimedia and connectivity and a very good modem have helped us in creating very good IoT products. So that is something we have been doing this already like smart metres and wearables and voice assistance devices like Amazon echo dot so these are the various things that we have been already doing.

But if you see existing cellular networks like 2G or 3G and 4G they do not have the capacity to take the load of billions of IoT devices that would come up in the coming years so that's why looking forward MediaTek has been the key player in driving the formulation and implementation of 3G PP, LPWA. Low power wide area specification these are the specification for NB IoT.

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This will help us to support large-scale connectivity that is a one challenge which industry will face when you going to have billions of billions of devices how are you going to support such a big number in terms of network connectivity that's where MediaTek has been a major push for NB IoT because this will not only support billions of devices but also power-efficient and support for long battery life.

In fact in June this year MediaTek had announced MT2621 chipset that includes 1st dual-mode SoC design for applications with NB IoT and its already been validated by Softbank, so we should be able to see that very soon (It's already launched in June). So this something which is going to reinforce the company’s commitment to ready NB IoT technology for the global market.

IoT and Smart City: The Future

Anku said that we are working with many device partners so as you know we are a chip company, we have many device partners who are actually making the devices. So we have been working with our device partners to conduct a test in India with the Indian telecom operators, so that's already happening. So that devices enabled by our technology are able to perform well in the Indian environment. Our device partners are also working with the government agencies so that they can encash the opportunities which going to happen very soon. For example, the smart city project which aims to transform 100 cities, so this would be a very good opportunity for us and as well as our partners.