https://iot-portal.com Development Blog

  The raison d'etre of any voice intercom is, unsurprisingly, to make voice calls! It can have any number of fancy features and apps but without the ability to make calls it's useless. Unfortunately, the majority of intercoms on the market today have a real problem with this. 2G and 3G have a dedicated voice and SMS channels as part of the connection to the network which connect calls directly to the circuit switched analogue phone network. 4G has no native voice channel and does its calling through the internet in the same way as a VoIP call does and this...

Whilst I'm in Ireland I thought I'd fire up a few boards and see what networks we still have available in Dublin. They're shutting down 3G on Vodafone as I type. At the moment though, it appears to still be available here:   +COPS: (from an EG91-E) (1,"3","3","27205",7) Three 4G (1,"IRL - METEOR","METEOR","27203",2) Eir 3G (1,"IRL - METEOR","METEOR","27203",7) Eir 4G (1,"IRL - METEOR","METEOR","27203",0) Eir 2G (1,"3","3","27202",0) Three/O2 2G (1,"vodafone IE","voda IE","27201",2) Vodafone 3G (1,"vodafone IE","voda IE","27201",0) Vodafone 2G (2,"3","3","27202",2) Three 3G (1,"vodafone IE","voda IE","27201",7) Vodafone 4G   When it comes to the IoT bands we have to use another board...

We have some stats regarding network usage on our 5G diallers. These devices have 2G, NB-IoT and LTE-M available to them. They are set to select LTE-M as their primary network, 2G as their secondary network and NB-IoT as their last choice. This is the order of network latency with NB-IoT having the highest latency (delays in message sending and receiving). Network usage is as follows: LTE-M: 22% NB-IoT: 15% 2G: 63%   It does appear most devices are using 2G however there are some reasons for this which may not reflect the true network usage. Firstly, when the device...

October 2022 and we see almost UK wide availability of the 2 IoT bands implemented as part of the 5G roll-out; NB-IoT and LTE-M. Here in Liverpool we have LTE-M on both Vodafone and O2 and NB-IoT on both EE and Vodafone. Checking above ground in Liverpool City Centre shows the following networks available to our BG95-M3 modems: at+cops=?... +cops:(1,"vodafone UK","voda UK","23415",0) 2G(2,"EE","EE","23430",0) 2G(1,"O2 - UK","O2 - UK","23410",0) 2G(1,"O2 - UK","O2 - UK","23410",8) LTE-M(1,"EE","EE","23430",9) NB-IoT(1,"vodafone UK","voda UK","23415",8) LTE-M(1,"vodafone UK","voda UK","23415",9) NB-IoT Obviously above ground we've got loads of options but what these new IoT bands bring is enhanced coverage where...

Just before he popped home Michael did a quick video showing how to set up a 5G GSM Alarm Dialler. These are excellent products and are very simple to set up and use. They have an extremely high level of reliability and will operate for a decade without any user intervention.