AT&T, Vodafone Business Partner for NB-IoT Roaming Across U.S., Europe

AT&T and Vodafone Business will open up access to their respective NB-IoT networks to make it easier for customers to create massive IoT deployments that work across the U.S. and parts of Europe.

The inter-carrier roaming arrangement creates the largest NB-IoT footprint in the world. It will include the country-wide NB-IoT network for AT&T in the U.S. and the Vodafone networks in Spain, Germany, Italy, UK and the Netherlands. It will be available to customers by the end of 2019.

NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network designed specifically for IoT devices that require long battery life, high-signal penetration and low data volumes.

This network arrangement enables companies to take advantage of the unique network features of NB-IoT, simplifying their supply chain and facilitating seamless operations across multiple networks with a single highly secure SIM.

“Extending our collaboration with AT&T to offer NB-IoT roaming helps our customers to easily deploy their connected devices between the U.S. and Europe,” said Vinod Kumar, CEO, Vodafone Business. “We want to make technology adoption simpler for our customers to help them achieve their business outcomes and by pushing forward the standards and linking up our IoT network with AT&T’s, we’re doing just that.”

“For the IoT to live up to its promise, it must be global,” said Chris Penrose, Senior Vice President of Advanced Mobility and Enterprise Solutions, AT&T. “More and more of our enterprise customers are launching IoT applications across multiple countries. Working with Vodafone we can offer our customers simplified deployments to help scale their IoT plans across the U.S. and Europe.”

This collaboration builds on the previous announcement in February that AT&T and Vodafone Business are offering LTE-M roaming across their respective networks in the U.S. and the Netherlands.

Both carriers are committed to expanding their NB-IoT and LTE-M roaming footprints globally to put LPWA on a similar global footprint to 4G. NB-IoT and LTE-M are also expected to be included in the global standards for 5G massive IoT.