High Level Forum on e-agriculture “2gether 4 Strong Digital Agriculture”

       Last week RILABS PLC attended the High Level Forum on e-agriculture “2gether 4 Strong Digital Agriculture" in Sofia, Bulgaria alongside leading companies in the sector and government officials from the Western Balkan countries, bulgarian vice prime minister Donchev, buglarian agriculture minister Porozhanov, representataves of the Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations and the European Comission.
      Topics of discussions were e-agriculture, its opportunities, challenges and regional complexities, the current state of play, how to boost innovation, enabling more broadband and connectivity infrastructure projects, available programs for financing and presentations of products in the field, incentivization. RILABS will participate in the local Digital Agro Hub organization by the patronage of the Institute for Agrostrategy and Innovations with its smart soil analysis soultion and is pleased to find that is uniquely positioned to deliver modern technological advances to the small and middle businesses and family farms who cannot afford the complex and pricey solutions currently on the market. Also, the NB IoT technology which RILABS pioneers will allow for better connectivity coverage in rural and high mountain areas.
       Key takeaways from the conference was the need of knowledge sharing between institutions and farmers regarding the benefits of e-agriculture and the newest technological developments and a call for socially responsible companies such as RILABS to facilitate the uptake of technology to lead the war against hunger and poverty in a world with ever increasing population.

NB-IoT Seminar in Bonn, Germany

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.