Making good on a promise, Verizon says it is rolling out wireless Internet of things (IoT) service nationally. During the CTIA show in Las Vegas last year, a Verizon representative said that the LTE M1 standard would be deployed throughout its U.S. network by April. Verizon beat that deadline by a day, saying in a press release that as of yesterday, it was launching…
The first nationwide commercial 4G LTE Category M1 (or Cat M1) network, which spans 2.4 million square miles. This is the first and only Cat M1 network providing scale, coverage and security for customers seeking wireless access solutions for IoT. Verizon’s Cat M1 network is built on a virtualized cloud environment which enables rapid and agile IoT solution deployment and nationwide scaling aimed at increasing IoT adoption for developers and businesses with new and more economical IoT data plans.
Service pricing starts at $2 for 200 KB per month, and scales up to $80 for 10 GB. IoT – also known as machine-to-machine or M2M – applications can be very parsimonious with bandwidth, so the low end package could be enough to support basic functionality for, say, an environmental monitor or on/off control for remote devices such as security lights or a heating/cooling system.
LTE M1 technology is a cut down version of regular LTE. The next rev will be the LTE NB1 standard – NB as in narrow band – which will be aimed at the ultra low power, ultra low bandwidth end of the market that’s currently targeted by the LoRa and Sigfox systems.
M1 equipment needs to be plugged in or recharged relatively frequently, ultra low power/bandwidth devices are designed to run off a small battery for a year or more. Both standards will find uses. For example, it might make perfect sense to pay $2 a month to control an electric irrigation pump with an always-available M1 connection, but the thousand or so soil and temperature sensors scattered around a field that support that pump can get by with much cheaper occasional 12 byte bursts, the kind of payloads that the ultra-low systems can deliver.
NB1 deployments could begin this year, but are more likely to go mainstream in 2018.