We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
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Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#2We at Hiber [0] are working on an actual low-power solution, which will give the device a way to transmit once a day to a sattelite with a custom 144 bytes user payload. The device location is already encoded, so you can focus on filling those 144 bytes with anything you'd like. You'll have global coverage and a central system to extract the data.
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#3I would love to see an actual low power, long range system: a cross between Bluetooth low energy and LTE. Allow devices to transmit at a higher power than Bluetooth and with much smaller receiver on time than LTE.
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#4We at Hiber [0] are working on an actual low-power solution, which will give the device a way to transmit once a day to a sattelite with a custom 144 bytes user payload. The device location is already encoded, so you can focus on filling those 144 bytes with anything you'd like. You'll have global coverage and a central system to extract the data. [0] https://hiber.global/
We would like to evaluate this. Currently looking at Sigfox, space.fleet and others. I sent a message via the Hiber contact page.
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#5I would love to see an actual low power, long range system: a cross between Bluetooth low energy and LTE. Allow devices to transmit at a higher power than Bluetooth and with much smaller receiver on time than LTE.
Isn't that exactly what Sigfox and LoRaWAN are?
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#6I would love to see an actual low power, long range system: a cross between Bluetooth low energy and LTE. Allow devices to transmit at a higher power than Bluetooth and with much smaller receiver on time than LTE.
Duplex? Scheduled or unscheduled transmissions? What about LoRaWAN?
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#7The thing is that LTE-M allows you to have real IP connectivity in contrast to other true LPWAN technologies built on datagrams that are sufficiently small that any real cryptography is non-trivial challenge and can be transmited once each minute/hour/day. If there is any unserviced niche it is in duplex bursts of realtime traffic (ie. what you usually get for satellite telematics, but for IoT it has to be few orders of magnitude cheaper)
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#8On another note, GPS tracker is probably wrong application for this assesment as I would believe that GPS receiver has significantly larger power consumption than LTE-M radio.
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#9This is the kind of blather I expect from business types without hardware experience.
The issue with NB-IoT right now is chicken vs egg.
NB-IoT stuff currently is limited to expensive modules.
Why? Because the carriers aren't rolling this out yet and when it is it's expensive. So, nobody is going to make a chip for it since the volume isn't going to be there for a while (Intel, for example, just pulled out of making NB-IoT chips). So, the badly integrated systems are going to be battery hungry and expensive, which means that the carriers don't see any volume and consequently don't feel the need to work very hard rolling it out.
Once the carriers finally get NB-IoT stuff universally deployed (even if it's expensive) then the silicon vendors will go to work on integrating everything into a single chip.
Once that happens, someone will say: "Hi, T-Mobile, I have 10 million devices I would like to activate and connect. Would you like to do this or should I go talk to Verizon, AT&T, etc." and the prices will come down.
This will follow the same trajectory as cellular data vs cellular voice.
Re: We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
#10This is the kind of blather I expect from business types without hardware experience. The issue with NB-IoT right now is chicken vs egg. NB-IoT stuff currently is limited to expensive modules. Why? Because the carriers aren't rolling this out yet and when it is it's expensive. So, nobody is going to make a chip for it since the volume isn't going to be there for a while (Intel, for example, just pulled out of making…
Intel pulling out is far from a canary in the coal mine. The rest of your post is fairly accurate though!
Background: Intel has serious production issues with their latest 10nm process, meaning their x86 chips and LTE modems for Apple are filling most of their capacity to manufacture chips on the existing 14nm process. I doubt Intel has LTE modem designs that work on older processes, and NB-IOT being unproven, low volume and needing low power chips means it could really use the best process available. Thus, with no slack capacity to build chips, why spend engineering time on something you can't build in quantity?
If 10nm were usable, Intel would likely have numerous side projects filling their older 14nm fabs. Sadly this won't be the case for Intel anytime soon.