South Korean mobile carriers SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus on Wednesday collided over the superiority of new networks for the Internet of Things technology as the latter two established a new alliance against the segment’s leader SKT.

KT and LG Uplus on Thursday announced a new partnership for the swift commercialization and expansion of the Narrow Band-Internet of Things, or NB-IoT, network across the nation.

The two local carriers plan to cooperate in making the NB-IoT the standard network supporting devices utilizing IoT technology. They did not disclose a concrete investment plan.

Their joint push towards NB-IoT challenges their rival and segment leader SK Telecom’s pursuit of an alternative IoT network called LoRaWAN, which stands for “long-range wide area network.”

KT and LG Uplus highlighted the superiority of NB-IoT over LoRaWAN during a press conference held in Seoul Wednesday to mark their partnership, sparking criticism from SKT which claimed the rivals moves “hurt the development of Korea’s IoT ecosystem."

NB-IoT and LoRaWAN are both low-power networks designed to transmit small amounts of data at low speeds from sensors attached to battery-run objects to base stations across long distances.

The former operates on existing Long Term Evolution, or LTE, networks, minimizing the costs of installing new network infrastructures. Due to its extensive coverage, NB-IoT network signals can reach hard-to-reach locations such as underground facilities or mountains, KT said.

Meanwhile, LoRaWAN operates on unlicensed spectrum bands and transmits data at very low speeds of below 5 kilobits per second, making it extremely power-efficient. LoRaWAN was deployed nationwide in Korea in June through SKT.

Both networks stand as low-cost, low-power networks that can bring to the market new IoT-based technologies and services such as the off-sight monitoring of street lights, manholes and water reservoirs, as well as wearables to track down lost cattle or pets.

Currently, IoT networks are still in the emerging stages and telecom companies around the world have engaged in a race to make one network format -- whether it is LoRaWAN, NB-IoT or Sigfox -- the global standard for IoT.

In this ongoing battle, SKT has placed its bets on LoRaWAN, while KT and LG Uplus believe NB-IoT will eventually win over the global IoT network standardization race.

KT and LG Uplus plan to commercialize NB-IoT networks in Korea by the beginning of next year and together source equipment needed to build NB-IoT network systems such as chipsets, modules, eSims and terminals.

Cho Chang-gil, head of the network division at LG Uplus, said that NB-IoT offers wider coverage from the start, even to remote locations, as they depend on existing LTE networks. However, LoRaWAN operators must install new network repeaters to get the same coverage, adding new costs, according to Cho. 

Among other benefits, NB IoT offers faster data transmission speeds, transmission quotas, and coverage area compared to those of NB-IoT at similar costs, he added.

“Our network experts simply could not find any benefits of LoRa over NB-IoT,” LG Uplus vice president Ahn Sung-jun said in explaining why NB-IoT is superior to LoRaWAN during the press conference.

Several hours after, SKT released a statement saying KT and LG Uplus are making one-sided claims that fail to reflect the benefits of LoRaWAN, a “promising technology geared to significantly contribute to the growth of Korea’s IoT market.”

“We are disappointed that KT and LG Uplus are slandering competitive technologies without coming up with an investment agenda of their own. We feel this reflects their realization that they are falling behind in IoT investment,” SKT said.

The leading carrier stressed that it has been at the forefront of Korea’s IoT ecosystem development, deploying LoRaWAN in conjunction with its faster LTE-M IoT network in June and working with local utility and service companies to launch new IoT-based technologies and services here.

For now, LoRaWAN appears to be faster in terms of entry to market. LoRaWAN has been deployed in some 150 major cities spanning the globe, according to the LoRa Alliance founded last year with the aim of standardizing LoRaWAN networks around the world.

Among some 400 members of the LoRa Alliance are France-based Orange, Japan-based Softbank, US-based Comcast and Korea’s SKT, as well as hardware companies IBM, Semtech, Cisco and Actility.

At the same time, a number of telecom giants such as US-based AT&T and UK-based Vodafone as well as Korea’s KT and LG Uplus have been pursuing NB-IoT on the belief it will overtake LoRaWAN in the long run. 

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)