Sequans has extensive global experience with utilities and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) companies, and is enhancing its influence in Canada through membership in Canada’s first 1.8 GHz private LTE (pLTE) utility ecosystem. The consortium, recently announced by Electricity Canada, the national forum of Canadian Electric Utilities, and Ubiik, a leading provider of pLTE systems, was established to support utility networks operating at the 1.8 GHz frequency. Other consortium members include advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) vendors and semiconductor companies. The members have all committed themselves to supporting next generation utility networks in Canada through ensuring that Electricity Canada’s 30 MHz of spectrum in the 1.8 GHz private LTE band is fully leveraged to the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
Canadian Electric Utilities have the sole right to use the 1.8 GHz band for private networks in Canada. The frequency can support ultra reliability, security, and low latency as needed for the advanced utility applications, including distribution automation, remote monitoring of smart meters, and predictive maintenance, that utilities need to modernize their networks.
For its part, Sequans is dedicated to ensuring its customers have optimized and competitive solutions to address the Canadian market while maintaining failover to public mobile networks. Sequans is enabling support of the 1.8 GHz frequency on its Monarch 2 LTE-M/NB-IoT chip platform, expanding further its global deployment capability, and is working with partners Ubiik and Itron, to demonstrate how operating on this frequency can benefit Canadian electric utilities and their customers. Sequans Monarch 2, already deployed in millions of smart meters worldwide, is one of the industry’s leading LTE-M/NB-IoT connectivity solutions, and it can support advanced services in both private and public networks.
Itron recently selected Sequans Monarch 2 for its smart meters deployed in Queensland, Australia, partly because of these significant benefits.
Behind the scenes, the 3GPP has just approved the integration of the 1.8 GHz band within the scope of 3GPP Release 19 for LTE-M and NB-IoT and Sequans has been leading in this effort by supporting the 1.8 GHz band in Monarch 2. The entire 1.8 GHz ecosystem now has an official standard to support their deployments in Canada.