LTE-M Archives - Tesswave

NB-IoT vs. LTE-M: What are the Differences?

March 27, 2023

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is an emerging area in realizing massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. LTE-M and NB-IoT are the most popular cellular-based LPWAN technologies in the market to realize LPWAN applications. In this article, we will briefly introduce both NB-IoT and LTE-M and their main differences to make a design decision for your LPWAN solution. What is NB-IoT? This is an LPWAN technology enabling a limited bandwidth, developed by 3GPP for cellular wireless communication and enabling massive IoT applications over a wide area network. It is one of the three main 3GPP standards introduced to help realize massive IoT applications. This is aimed at low power and deep coverage networks up to 20 km of range. It is also optimized for better latency reaching up to 10 seconds. Though NB-IoT operates in the licensed frequency spectrum, it is optimized to minimize interference and allow massive IoT

What is LTE-M and How it Compares to NB-IoT?

December 31, 2022

What is LTE-M? Internet of Things (IoT) applications that are deployed in Wide Area Networks require reliable communication protocols. LTE-M or LTE-Cat M1 is a such WAN protocol. It belongs to the Low Power WAN (LPWAN) family where other technologies such as LoRa and NB-IoT belong. It can be considered a cellular technology-based competitor to other LPWAN technologies specifically aimed at realizing WAN IoT applications. It was first released in Release 13 by 3GPP in 2016. The significance of LTE-M is its lower bandwidth applications in connecting resource-limited devices over a WAN. LTE-M relies on the existing cellular infrastructure, thus reducing the overhead cost of setting up new infrastructure. LTE-M can provide a data rate of up to 4Mbps as per Release 14. How does LTE-M work? LTE-M unlike its cellular counterparts like LTE, is focused on IoT and M2M applications over a Wide Area Network. For this purpose, LTE-M has