Chile’s Movistar Empresas, the business-focused division of operator Movistar, has announced the deployment of an LTE-M network in the country, which, it says, will allow organisations of various sizes to connect their Internet of Things (IoT) devices with greater energy efficiency.
LTE-M is a type of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) radio communication technology standard developed by standards group 3GPP for machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT applications.
As its name suggests, it is deployed over a 4G network. Movistar Empresas says that, compared to other technologies in the LPWAN family such as NB-IoT, LTE-M allows similar functionalities of extended coverage and optimisation of battery life but is superior in terms of maximum data transfer speed, minimum terminal reaction times and allowing data transfer to be maintained on moving devices.
Rodrigo Rivera, Marketing Manager of B2B Digital Services, explains: “The deployment of the Movistar LTE-M network is the next step in the evolution of cellular communications between machine-to-machine (M2M) devices, on the path towards massive IoT.”
He continues: “The LTE-M network covers the needs of companies in different sectors, as it allows the transfer of small data packets with low latency, coverage in hard-to-reach areas, savings in device costs and longer battery life, contributing to the operational efficiency and sustainability of our clients."
Potential use cases in Chile are likely to include fleet management, smart lighting, precision agriculture, connected meters, and various smart city applications, among others.
This LTE-M network is available to traditional M2M connectivity customers, allowing different devices and systems to communicate and share data with each other, without direct human intervention.
This new network will be complemented by the KITE managed connectivity platform from Telefónica Tech, which offers a wide range of integrated technological services and solutions in cyber security, cloud, IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and blockchain. With KITE, companies can control and monitor their connected devices in real time, remotely and from anywhere in the world.
Movistar Empresas has more than 6 million IoT connections in Latin America, 1.5 million of them in Chile.