31–40 of 66 posts
maybe Amazon or some other big guy interested in IoT should acquire LoRA, then for low-power use cases, LTE-M has absolutely no chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, ultra-low power devices (ie months-/years-long battery life) are probably better suited for older technology nodes, say 40+ nm for bulk, or 22+ nm for SoI. Standby leakage power is going to be too high on the lower nodes. Lasting months/years on a coin cell means sub-1 uA standby combined with infrequent, short-lived wake cycles. There's no real way around this until you go to energy harvesting, and right n…
Excellent post -- a rarely understood truth. For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX. But realistically the quiescent power drain still needs to be in the sub 5uW range to deliver long life on a small battery. A lot of GNSS and LTE SoC's standby in the 50uW range, which is just too much. Most of the LTE devices I've surveyed (M1, NB-IoT) are expected to be attached…
That is very highly dependent upon the system.
Some systems are all about leakage--these spend most of their lifetime on a shelf and a couple of days actually active.
Some systems are all about sensors or actuators and the communication is in the noise.
Some systems are all about calling home, and those require good TX consumption.
We 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/
Especially if you are in an urban/sky contrained environment.
We 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/
with respect, iridium is not low power. even the small "IoT" modem https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-core-9523/ requires 2.5 watts peak. even once a day, you're lucky to get a months worth of reports from anything less than 10whr battery. Especially if you are in an urban/sky contrained environment.
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We would like to evaluate this. Currently looking at Sigfox, space.fleet and others. I sent a message via the Hiber contact page.
If you want to experiment with LoRaWAN, we open sourced our Network Service: https://github.com/exploratoryengineering/congress We also open sourced our module design (EE-02) that uses nRF52 as the MCU: https://github.com/ExploratoryEngineering/ee0x-hardware You can buy the modules here, but I think stocks might be running low. (However, if anyone needs larger numbers of modules we can put you into contact with the f…
Let's be honest, LTE was always oversold in terms of its technical limitations. The first reference to it that I can recall seeing (years ago) actually was describing LTE Advanced (~150 Mb/s), but conveniently left out that information. I know that it had been shown in testing to reach 200 Mb/s - call me when real world usage data can show that kind of result. In reality, the kind of progress that @barbegal mentions…
Random result in Stockholm, in a relatively built-up office district:
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/2834370481
I’ve never found myself disappointed with LTE performance, even the RTT is “good enough” for 90% of my applications
I’ve done a lot of prototyping with LTE, GPRS, LTE-M, and NB-LTE chipsets (along with having previously worked for a Bluetooth tracker company) and I think this article is making a false conclusion. The terrible battery life of these example products is much more caused by the power devouring GPS or a lack of adequate battery capacity in these products than by the LTE-M chipset.
For example the well-known nRF51: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/1657/how-to-mini.... It can be as low as 20 uA. Between advertisements 4 uA.
We 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/
Claimed pole to pole coverage tells me this is based on an embedded Iridium SBD modem.
The 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…
A few things. (1) If the payload is shorter than the key length (e.g. 128 bits) then crypto is actually really strong (and easy). For long payloads, you need to work a lot harder. (2) For doing a public key handshake, you can do it without a huge packet using one of the elliptical curve algos, but for any public key handshake you need a reasonably short duration of the handshake in order for it to be adequately secur…