A Primer on Cellular IoT

In June 2016, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP ) — a consortium of telecommunications standards organizations — finalized the specification for Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT). NB-IoT completes the trilogy of major cellular IoT network releases (LTE-Cat M and EC-GSM being the other two) while we await the development and deployment of 5G networks. These three standards are muscling their way into an already crowded and fragmented LPWAN market; positioning themselves as strong contenders to SigFox, LoRa, RPMA, and Weightless.