Sierra Wireless, Sequans, Dell and ip.access all kicked off MWC with IoT-related announcements.
The internet of things represents an enormous business opportunity for companies inside and outside the mobile industry. Wireless carriers will be racing to win new customers in the months ahead, and at this week’s Mobile World Congress their hardware vendors are launching solutions designed to streamline the process for carriers and their future customers.
Module maker Sierra Wireless claimed “the world’s first ‘plug-and-play’ cellular modules and routers with pre-integrated global connectivity, IoT operation management and security.” The company said enterprises shouldn’t have to source multiple connectivity solutions and management platforms in order to connect devices around the world.
“The complexity of deploying IoT solutions is the biggest challenge for businesses today,” said Philippe Guillemette, CTO at Sierra Wireless. “Our new technology is much more than a SIM in a device, it’s an industry breakthrough that truly simplifies the IoT ecosystem. Our customers can focus on transforming their business and rely on Sierra Wireless to securely connect, monitor and collect data from their devices.”
Sierra Wireless did not say which chip vendor is supplying cellular modems for its modules, but the company has a long history of working with Sony’s Altair Semiconductor.
Huawei is also launching a set of IoT modules and the company said it will source LTE modems from Sequans. Huawei said the Sequans solution offers worldwide interoperability, as well as high performance coupled with a low power budget and a small footprint.
“Bringing new modules to market based on Sequans’ chip, the first true LTE Category M1/NB1 chip to become available, will enable us to aggressively support our customers,” said Ralph Huang, M2M product director at Huawei’s devices group. “The demand for IoT devices is growing rapidly.”
The Sequans LTE Cat M1 chip Huawei will use has been certified by Verizon Wireless, and Sequans is in talks with other U.S. carriers as well. The company markets its Cat M1 chip as a standalone modem or as part of an integrated system-on-chip that includes an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a low-power sensor hub, a graphics processing unit and display controller, and a media processing engine. Sequans said the goal is to simplify the development of IoT devices.
Simplifying IoT device design is also the goal of a new development kit launched this week in Barcelona, Spain, by Dell, EpiSensor and Asavie. The solution combines Asavie’s IoT connectivity management platform with Dell’s gateway and EpiSensor’s industrial sensors. The team is trying to enable connectivity from the network edge to the cloud on an infrastructure platform that can scale along with IoT designs so developers do not need to change their hardware or software when they move from prototype to commercial launch.
“This out-of-the-box IoT solution offers secure, seamless connectivity from the edge to the cloud, enabling enterprises to jump start their industrial IoT projects, get to market faster and generate revenues sooner,” the companies said in a statement.
If massive industrial IoT projects do come to market, many of them may rely on LTE networks to deliver aggregated data to the cloud. With the goal of helping LTE networks support more machine traffic in the years ahead, small cell chip developer ip.access is integrating narrow band IoT and LTE Cat M1 into its solutions.
“The industry will rely on a mix of Cat M1 for wearables, medical and assisted living applications, and [narrowband]-IoT for low data rate sensors of many types,” said ip.access CTO Nick Johnson. “Furthermore, the IoT devices may not be as mobile as today’s smartphones, and so will be even more vulnerable to network fades and not-spots. Small cell connectivity is one of the essential foundational components for the IoT industry as it scales.”
