Telenor opened a facility in Sweden to test the performance of IoT devices against a range of network scenarios, designed to help its clients identify issues in advance and prevent costs before products hit the market.

Located in the municipality of Karlskrona, Telenor explained the facility aims to help customers “understand how their connected IoT products behave before deployment”. The site will be equipped with a Faraday cage tailored to test different networks, providing access to connectivity across all of Telenor’s Nordic operations.

Telenor added the lab features “advanced steering and control systems allowing control of the available operator, access technology and even signal levels” to simulate most network scenarios in a controlled and repeatable way.

This way, businesses can verify how IoT devices perform under different roaming scenarios, or learn about their energy efficiency in “various network conditions and signal strengths”, for example.

Businesses have options to test their IoT devices on-site or remotely by sending the products to the operator’s test manager, with a “long-term testing” scheme also on offer. Additionally, Telenor’s IoT specialists can provide consultations in planning the tests and analysing results.

The company noted advances in network technologies have delivered wider coverage, improved power consumption and throughput, and at the same time adding complexities in the deployment of IoT devices.

To this end, Telenor argues “the profiling and tuning of settings are required to extract the optimum performance for the customer’s specific use case”.

In May, research house Informa recorded a total of 16.1 billion active IoT devices globally in 2023, a figure it forecasted to reach almost 40 billion by 2033.