The country's three mobile operators – China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom – account for 64 per cent of the world’s 1.5 billion cellular IoT connections, including the rapidly growing mobile IoT licensed low power wide area (LPWA) technologies.

Alex Sinclair, CTO of the industry association, said: “Backed by proactive government support, China is now at the forefront in the development and mass deployment of innovative and transformative IoT-based solutions based on mobile IoT technology.”

New applications are being implemented across multiple vertical sectors and fundamentally altering the way people live and work, delivering real-time information and making cities smarter and our lives easier and more productive, he continued.

China has a wide variety of examples of large-scale deployments across a growing number of sectors.

For example, Sunsea AIoT partnered with China Telecom to install more than 500,000 NB-IoT sensors covering more than 37km in Jing’an district. Sensors monitor such things as fire hydrant water pressure and various environmental conditions. An integrated platform centralises, monitors and analyses data to enable real-time improvements.

China Mobile deployed more than 100,000 NB-IoT intelligent fire detection systems including alarms, temperature sensors, and smoke and gas detectors across China.

And China Unicom installed more than 25,000 gas and water meters using an NB-IoT platform combining IoT with big data to make energy management more intelligent.

The GSMA’s Internet of Things programme includes the Future IoT Convention, which brings experts from governments, mobile operators and enterprises to demonstrate and discuss the latest developments in IoT, 5G and big data.

A Mobile IoT Developer Day aims to help companies start building devices and go to market using NB-IoT technology. And Connected China (Hall E7 in 4YFN) puts the spotlight on three key IoT vertical markets: Smart Industry, Smart Cities and Smart Home.