Connectivity – MASH ICT

Libelium – company review

About the company Libelium is a Spanish company founded in 2006. with deployments in more than 120 countries. Their motto is to connect any sensor via any connectivity to any cloud platform. Libelium’s main product is Waspmote, an IoT end device supporting various connectivity protocols. Good thing about Libelium is that they offer more than 110 sensors of various kind to detect gases, events, water, ions, cars, and even radiation. With it’s products, Libelium is covering quite a lot of verticals: smart cities, smart environment, smart water, smart metering, security and emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, smart agriculture, home automation…

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August 24, 2018

NEWS: LoRa vs SigFox news note and SigFox problems

Although I have already wrote about connectivity options for IoT systems and also about Lora vs SigFox, here I would like to link to another very good and brief article from Link-labs. The article compares SigFox and LoRa, two of the most prominent players in the unlicensed LPWAN market. SigFox chips and modules are made by several manufacturers and they are quite low cost, but the network and backend is totally owned by SigFox or the appointed SigFox operator which is good since allows roaming and bad since you have only one option. On the other hand LoRa is made…

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July 23, 2018

All posts / IOT 101

What is NB-IoT?

NB-IoT stands for “NarrowBand Internet of Things” and it’s low power wide area (LPWA) cellular radio access technology standardized by 3GPP with aim to enable a wide range of IoT devices and services. 3GPP has defined a set of frequency bands for NB-IoT use: Release 13 list consists of bands: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 66 and Release 14 added the bands: 11, 25, 31, 70 and by Release 15 we’ll have additional bands: 4, 14, 71. There are three deployment modes specified by 3GPP: LTE in-band mode, LTE guard-band mode and…

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July 17, 2018

All posts / Industrial IoT / IOT 101

Tracking objects using LPWAN networks

Being able to track objects (geolocation) is one of the most important applications of today M2M and more recently IoT networks. As described in the previous article there are several types of network used for IoT. However we are talking about GPS-free geolocation which is one of the "killer apps" for LoRaWAN. SigFox doesn't support geolocation. Cellular technologies like LTE-CatM and NbIoT should support “native” geolocation (without the GPS) from 3GPP Release 14. Outdoor geolocation using GPS and/or LoRa The traditional way of tracking the outdoor location of the device is to install the GPS receiver inside your device which is…

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June 30, 2018

All posts / IOT 101

Connectivity solutions for IoT

There are many very different IoT applications today from soil sensors that send a few bytes every few hours, up to the driverless car that sends many Megabytes of data constantly. Many if not all these applications depend upon good connectivity, but a question arises…what is a good connectivity for IoT? When planning IoT networks there are three major factors to pick from and these are power consumption, range and bandwidth/data rate. If your sensors can connect to a stable power source then it’s quite easy to reach good range and bandwidth, but in most applications this is not the…

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June 17, 2018