GSMA gets 14 cellcos to join its APAC IoT program

IoT GSMA
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Fourteen mobile operators across Asia Pacific have joined the GSMA APAC IoT Partnership Programme that aims to establish regional labs to accelerate IoT development.

According to the GSMA, the program represents the largest IoT community in the region with over 500 partners, including mobile operators, consultants, developers, manufacturers, system integrators and vertical solution providers, amongst others, and is set to grow to over 2,000 partners by 2020.

Celcom, Dialog, DTAC, M1, Maxis, Ncell, Optus, Robi, Smart, Smartfren, Singtel, True, XL and Xpand have now officially joined the program, and other will follow, said Julian Gorman, head of Asia Pacific at GSMA.

“The IoT is growing rapidly across the Asia Pacific region, with mobile operators working with their partners and the wider ecosystem to drive this expansion,” Gorman said. “This program will support the development of the IoT by creating a cross-regional IoT community to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing, as well as creating opportunities that benefit both the supply chain and their customers.”

A key focus of the program is the support of IoT Labs, which are being set up by operators across the region to encourage the development of new IoT products and services. The labs are a key requirement for collaboration and encourage the joint development of new use cases, services and applications, and enable IoT innovations to be effectively deployed.

All operators in the programme have signed a MoU to ensure that the coordination and output among the IoT Labs is consistent with IoT standards regionally and globally.

The Labs will be available to partners and customers in markets initially including Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

In addition to establishing and expanding the new IoT labs, participating operators have also committed to develop new initiatives and share best practices to accelerate the deployment of innovative IoT use cases.

According to GSMA Intelligence, the Asia Pacific region is the largest IoT market in the world, and is expected to account for 11 billion connections and represent a revenue opportunity of $386 billion by 2025.

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