One of the businesses which may shift the competitive balance between Ericsson and Huawei is the Internet of Things, particularly the wide area wireless networks which they hope will boost spending among their traditional customers, and perhaps lure new ones. Both firms are being aggressive in promoting NB-IoT, the upcoming LTE-based narrowband solution for low power wide area networks (LPWANs), even though, last fall, they had backed rival solutions in the 3GPP standards process. The politics behind that fight – which ended officially in a consensus approach, though Ericsson was seen to have won on points – were of the old-fashioned variety mobile vendors understand well. But in the IoT, these giant companies will be trying to outdo one another…