The talk is about LPWAN technologies and compares SigFox, LoRa and NB-IoT

1. NB-IoT a new technology for
IoT which has potential to
replace LoRa and SigFox
RuseConf 2019
(C) 2019 OLIMEX Ltd, CC BY-SA-3.0

2. Tsvetan Usunov, owner of OLIMEX Ltd.
Company dealing with electronic design and
production.
All our products are designed and produced in
Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
We produce development boards, programmers,
small Linux computers, and IoT devices.
Many of our products are with OSHW licensee and
certified by OSHWA.
$whoami

3. Low Power Wide Area Network
✔ Low consumption, nodes
can work for years powered by
battery
✔Wireless, long distance
What is LPWAN?

4. ✔ Remote metering electricity,
water, gas
✔ Environmental monitoring
✔ Waste management, parking
management, Lighting
✔ Storage monitoring, logistics
✔ Healthcare
✔ Agroculture monitoring and
management
✔ Industrial machinery monitoring
What they are used for?

5. Who are the major players?

6. SigFox
⊕ mature technology
⊕ good coverage
⊕ single operator
⊕ fair prices €3-7 per node per year
⊕ range 2 km urban 20 km rural
⊖ subscription
⊖ slow speed
⊖ no encryption
⊖ UL 12 bytes, DL 8 bytes
⊖ limit 2-140 UL, 0-4 DL per day
Since 2009
868/915/433 Mhz
BW 100 Hz
DR 100 bps
EU 400 ch

7. LoRaWAN
⊕ mature technology
⊕ no licensee and subscriptions
⊕ AES 128 encryption
⊕ no traffic limit
⊕ range 2 km urban 10 km rural
⊕ no trafic fees
⊖ бавна скорост
⊖ няма регулация
⊖ устройствата бързо запълват ефира
Since 2012
868/915/433 Mhz
BW 250/125 kHz
DR 292-5500 bps
PL 51-243 bytes

8. LoRa ограничения

9. LPWAN NB-IoT
⊕ use same GSM LTE network
⊕ licensed band, guaranteed Quality of Service
⊕ DL 25.5kbps UL 25.5 kbps
⊕ fair prices for SIMs (in EU)
(€10 for: 10 y / 500MB / 250 SMS)
⊕ single base cell connects to 100K nodes
⊕ range 1 km urban 10 km rural
⊕ LTE encryption
⊖ operator dependance
Since 2016
LTE GSM freq
BW 200 kHz
DR up to 200 kbps
PL 1600 bytes
10Y 200 byte/day

10. NB-IoT детайли
BC-66 Quectel
✔ covers all LTE bands worldwide
B1+B2+B3+B5+B8+B12+B13+B17
+B18+B19+B20+B25+B26+B28+B66
✔ works from 2.1 to 3.6V
✔ Coretex-M4 78Mhz 400K Flash 400K RAM
✔ DR UL 30Kbps DL 30Kbps
✔ range +20dB to GSM i.e. x10 times up to 100 km
✔ up to 100K nodes can connect to single base cell

11. NB-IoT-DevKit
BC-66 Quectel
✔ BC-66 module, SIM card connector
✔ Coretex-M4 (200K Flash 100K RAM)
✔ dimentions 25 х 40 мм
✔ embedded programmer via USB
✔ UART, SPI, I2C, 5 GPIO
✔ UEXT connector
✔ Breadboard friendly
✔ U.FL antenna connector
✔ status LEDs
✔ LiPo charger
✔ very low consumption

12. NB-IoT-DevKit

13. NB-IoT-DevKit

14. NB-IoT in Bulgaria
😐 to achieve NB-IoT activated SIM card is not easy in Bulgaria ( even
if you get one the SIM may be deactivated without nottice for unknown
reason) so you and your business is totally dependant from the operator
😐 the range depend very much on which band is the base cell. Best
results are on Band 8 900Mhz.
😐 you can’t connect selectively to base cell of your choice, you
always connect to the one which has strongest signal.

15. Summary:
LPWAN technologies has huge potential.
Out of the big three SigFox, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT in
Bulgaria only LoRa is used actively, there are lot of
problems due to the absence of regulations.
NB-IoT has potential to dominate, if local operator has
vision how to develop this network. For the moment
there is none and soon it will not change until
competition is grown up.

16. Questions?
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