Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) radio technology standard developed by 3GPP to enable a wide range of cellular devices and services. ... NB-IoT focuses specifically on indoor coverage, low cost, long battery life, and high connection density.
NB-IoT is a low power wide area network technology. Its purpose is to offer very low power consumption with a wider coverage , 10 plus year battery life, easy installation at a very low cost.
A follow-up comment: looking at the family of cellular IoT (EC-GSM-IoT, LTE-M and NB-IoT), NB-IoT provides the biggest deployment flexibility. Note that EC-GSM-IoT was designed to reuse GSM infrastructure and frequency channels (200kHz bandwidth); around 300-400kbps data rates are possible, but the activity around it in the industry and academia is rather limited, to my best knowledge. On the other hand, LTE-M is to be deployed in-band with LTE, uses wider bandwidth (6 PRB) and provides higher data rates (ideally up to 1Mbps). Finally, NB-IoT is the slowest (data rates no more than ~200kbps), but it only needs 1PRB (180kHz) to operate, meaning that one can either reuse a GSM carrier for it (still preserving 10kHz guardbands), place it in-band with LTE or even allocate NB-IoT within the LTE guardband.
I think the following book is the great source of knowledge:
Olof Liberg et al. "Cellular Internet of Things: Technologies, Standards, and Performance".