Demo may have frozen, but narrowband IoT stew is still piping hot

Ability to bill? Vodafone you say?

Not since they rolled out their new billing system they bloody well can't.

i already have a 'sigfox" NB-IoT

on my desk for 'playing' (built into an Arduino on sale at RS-Components)

I havent found a sigfox BTS with it yet, but according to https://www.sigfox.com/en/coverage there is some UK coverage already.

Not really the best use case....

I realise the real topic is the technology, not the car park, but really, a car park map showing free bays? It's amazing how many people seriously struggle with maps and they mostly have significant features for people to orient themselves from, not a blank uniform grid like a carpark. So to make it practical you'd need it to give driving instructions which then means the car needs to know where it is, even in an underground carpark, so layer on yet more technology. Personally I find a simple red/green light above the bay extremely effective. Sometimes, and this is far from the only example, because we can is not reason enough.

It also involves idiotic design decisions

I mean NB-IOT would be ideally suited for e-mail as the communications standard between the provider and the end user. Since we are often talking about _really_ low bitrates (<1000bps), transmitting a datagram takes quite some time anyhow.

E-Mail is fast, typically an e-mail will arive withing the second. However it's also resillient against errors. If your mailserver is down for a couple of hours you will not miss a single e-mail.