Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Group successfully completed the first international roaming trial in Europe using NB-IoT technology, industry association the GSMA announced.

In a statement, the GSMA said the two European mobile operators performed the trial using global SIMs from Deutsche Telekom on Vodafone Spain’s network; and global Vodafone SIMs on T-Mobile Austria’s network and commercial NB-IoT modules. The service is intended to “ensure seamless coverage for service continuity for millions of connections using low power wide area networks (LPWA)”, while the trials will also “provide guidance to other operators in delivering a constant level of implementation”, said the GSMA.

The GSMA further explained that enabling roaming on the technology is important to manufacturers deploying LPWA devices on a global basis and those looking to benefit from economies of scale.

In terms of use cases, roaming on logistics tracking, for example, can be greatly beneficial because it involves containers crossing numerous international borders on a single trip. Devices manufactured in one country but deployed in another, such as smart meters, can also experience the benefits of roaming.

Alex Sinclair, CTO at GSMA, said the successful trials were an important milestone in the “development of a sustainable roaming environment for mobile IoT networks”.

“The market has matured considerably in a very short time and we anticipate that this will be the year that mobile IoT scales,” he said. “Only licensed, managed mobile services provide the secure low power connection that can meet future demand.”

Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone jointly developed use cases in their trials and incorporated power saving features including Power Saving Mode, Long Periodic Tracking Area Update and various throughput and round trip time measurements.

NB-IoT and LTE-M are two standardised LPWA technologies, competing with unlicensed offerings from the likes of Sigfox and LoRa. Vodafone announced last month it was also planning to deploy LTE-M alongside NB-IoT later this year.