The launch of LTE Cat M1 and NB1 (NB-IoT) are part of the revolutionary steps towards the oncoming digital revolution. After attending the Embedded World exhibition in Nürnberg earlier this month, RILABS visited an exciting NB-IoT seminar, hosted by Deutsche Telekom in its headquarters in Bonn, Germany. We could meet leading experts from the domains networks, cloud connectivity, M2M, measurement engineering and antenna design. We exchanged experience and got knowledge about the status and the challenges of the NB-IoT deployment across Europe.
NB IoT is an excellent solution for stationary devices with bad signal quality (signal gain is 20dB higher than LTE). The aim of having a single compact battery through a device life cycle can be achieved by the proper enengineering of the task specific power profiles (eDRX, PSM) and the antenna design.
In a further post we will describe our evaluation of the Quectel NB IoT BC95 module, which was presented at the seminar in Bonn.