Missed our M2M customer event?

Earlier this month we hosted our first ever full-day M2M customer event at the BT Tower. As well as enjoying the fantastic views, it was a great opportunity to talk about our strategy and portfolio with over 60 customers from 40 different companies. Particularly because a lot of the attendees were partners who came from the EE side of the business, so we were able to get them up to speed on BT’s broader capabilities.

We had plenty of enthusiastic responses from the customers that attended. So we thought we’d provide a roundup of the main points we covered on the day for those that weren’t able to make it.

Coverage, speed and reliability: from 2G - 5G

Most of our M2M customers rely on the network to deliver time or mission critical data, so it’s really important that it’s fast and reliable. The fact that 91% of the UK is covered by EE’s 4G network definitely grabbed the audience’s attention. But because the 2G network is still used for most M2M solutions, our customers were keen to know more about its performance. A lot of international mobile operators have said they’ll be shutting down their 2G networks, but EE isn’t one of them. In fact it’s recently replaced all its 2G cell site equipment to boost performance and reliability.

We also ran through our progress in building our 5G network, and the importance of having a strong 4G network as a foundation. We were able to share results from three leading independent benchmarking surveys - P3, Ofcom and Rootmetrics. With all three confirming EE to be the leading mobile network in the UK.

Low Power Wide Area networks (LPWANs) will be the preferred carriers for many connected devices in the future, because of low data rates and long battery life. So we also shared an overview of IoT connectivity technologies and our focus on the rollout of LoRA and NBIoT networks.  

Successful partnerships

Partnering has been key to the success of the BT M2M team with both its customers and suppliers. We’ve teamed up with Jasper-Cisco on BT Control Centre to give us a world-leading M2M connectivity platform. At the event we shared details on the benefits of the platform, including the powerful analytics capabilities, as well as new features such as IMEI whitelisting, helping customers to stay in control of their fleet. By combining the strength of our network with our world-class platform our customers can feel confident that our M2M proposition can be relied on to underpin their business models and give them the edge against their competition.

Our focus on R&D

One real eye-opener for the audience was BT’s focus and investment in R&D. We showed them how lots of our IoT and M2M solutions are being used at our R&D centre at Adastral Park, to illustrate the connected world of the future. Partnering and developing together is central to the ethos of Adastral Park and continues to be a key model in the M2M and IoT ecosystem where no single company can offer all the different elements to make an IoT deployment successful. There’s also an opportunity for our M2M customers to have their innovative products and solutions on display at Adastral Park, helping to gain exposure. So if this is of interest get in touch with your account manager.

These really are exciting times in the M2M/IoT space and it’s great to get together with our partners to talk through their challenges and how we can support them, as well as sharing ideas for the future. If you want any further detail on what was discussed at the event feel free to get in touch on 0800 079 0162.