O2 is the first British telco to trial 3GPP-compliant Internet of Things connectivity tech in the UK later this year.
An O2 spokesman said that the company will be performing live trials this year to gain more practical insight into the technology.
O2 did not provide many details of the trials or which of the two standards it would be trying out.
So far the UK’s IoT connectivity uses sim-card based GSM-based M2M tech and various localised deployments of LoRaWAN and Sigfox.
This means that it is likely that there will be a commercial deployment of either technology in the UK next year.
NB-IoT is strongly favoured by Vodafone, which has faced problems with rolling it out in Europe. It is popular in China and the Far East, though LTE-M has been gaining ground in terms of commercial deployments over the last year.
LTE-M was popular in the American continent although it has been tested in Europe.
