Telit announced its portfolio of five new LTE single-mode IoT modules including two ME910 LTE UE Category M1 to cover major US mobile operators; two ME866 LTE UE Category M1 to cover major US mobile operators; and a NE866 LTE UE Category NB1 for the European market. Products begin sampling later this year with commercial availability slated for early 2017, in full alignment with American operators’ current service launch timelines.
These IoT-optimized LTE modules are compliant with the newly approved Release 13 standard set by the 3GPP, a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations empowered to guide the evolution of the mobile (cellular) technology industry globally.
Cat M1 and NB1 standards were devised to address specific needs of IoT applications, offering optimized power consumption and enhanced coverage. The new portfolio is being fast-tracked to address the pressing need in the U.S. market for migration paths away from 2G as well as strong global demand from the industry for Cat M1 and NB1 modules to enable of a wide variety of brand new product concepts.
Telit IoT Portal-ready modules, powered by deviceWISE, make device onboarding simple to program, maintain and scale. All of Telit’s M1 and NB1 modules are Telit IoT Portal-ready, supporting high-level commands designed to provide hassle-free onboarding of device and data to the cloud, customer apps, back-end systems and servers.
The new LTE UE Category M1 modules offer peak downlink and uplink data rates of 1Mbps. This generation of enhanced machine type communication (eMTC) products support power saving mode and extended discontinuous reception (EDRX), which together allow the module to wake up periodically, exchange small amounts of data with the network and return to sleep, providing for years of battery life.
The NE866 is a 3GPP Release 13 eMTC product capable of delivering long battery life of ten years or more, while offering peak data rates of 250Kbps downlink and 20Kbps uplink.
“Our customers and new IoT adopters already understand the different benefits Release 13 brings and are therefore looking for a complete portfolio of compliant modules, rather than a single product from module vendors claiming to be pioneering the new 3GPP standard. For starters, the standard includes two branches: M1 and NB1. Then, when you add to that, the fact that the NB1 specification allows for three different deployment scenarios which are not directly compatible with one another, you start to see the multitude of possibilities,” said Mike Ueland, President of Telit Americas. “What all this means is that in order to ensure you retain the device deployment flexibility you enjoyed with LTE Cat 1, for example, we are announcing a broad portfolio of Cat M modules here today.”
