AT&T pilots commercial LTE-M in a host of consumer and business use cases
AT&T is conducting simultaneous commercial pilots of LTE-M technology, spanning several industry use cases and consumer applications. The LTE-M commercial pilots, which involve dozens of connections, are taking place around the AT&T Labs in San Ramon, CA, near San Francisco, and in the Columbus, Ohio area.
AT&T and its enterprise customers are evaluating the performance of LTE-M network and chipset technology in a wide variety of situations: The US operator is working with Capstone Metering on smart water meters, CalAmp on connected vehicles and fleet & asset management, RM2 on smart pallets, Xirgo Technologies on container monitoring and asset tracking, PepsiCo on smart beverage fountains, Telular on home security and automation and Samsung on consumer devices.
The pilots, which began in the fourth quarter of 2016, involve solutions from a range of technology providers, including Ericsson and Nokia for radio network software, LTE-M chipsets from Altair and Qualcomm Technologies, and modules from Sierra Wireless, u-blox, Wistron NeWeb (WNC) and Telit.
AT&T can adapt its LTE base stations to support LTE-M with a straightforward software upgrade. The operator, which regards LTE-M as highly complementary to its existing LTE network, intends to provide customers with full end-to-end solutions that can support high bandwidth, medium bandwidth and low bandwidth connectivity as their solutions require. AT&T believes that most customers want a full range of capabilities on a single platform, including non-cellular connectivity solutions as well.
Key learnings
Across the various pilots, AT&T and companies piloting solutions are testing LTE-M’s performance on multiple metrics in a variety of locations. In some use cases, connected devices are transmitting data multiple times a day; in others, only once a day, sleeping most of the time. For some applications, the device may only come out of sleep mode once a threshold has been reached, such as when an oil gauge drops below a certain level. AT&T is also evaluating how many active simultaneous connections, and how many connections in sleep mode, LTE-M can support in a single cell. At the same time, AT&T is checking the compatibility of equipment from different vendors.
AT&T is expecting LTE-M to offer significantly extended battery life, smaller modules, and improved coverage, particularly in buildings and in subterranean locations, than conventional cellular technologies. Some of the smart meters involved in the pilot are below ground and deep in basements.
AT&T has accelerated its plans for nationwide deployment of LTE-M network technology to the second quarter of 2017 and plans to roll out the network in Mexico by the end of the year to create an LTE-M North American footprint covering more than 400 million people.