Rogers announced this week that it will light up an LTE-M network in Ontario before the end of the year with a view to rolling out the technology across Canada by 2020.
The Canadian telco said the network will make IoT solutions more accessible to Canadian businesses and will serve as a stepping stone on the route to 5G.
"With the launch of LTE-M, we are empowering the adoption of reliable, low cost, and secure IoT solutions that support a variety of use cases such as asset tracking, smart cities, utilities, transportation, and supply chain management," said Dean Prevost, enterprise president at Rogers Communications.
Rogers did not say when the Ontario launch will take place, other than confirming that it will happen this year. It will extend the network to additional provinces in 2019 and complete full national rollout by 2020, it said.
The telco highlighted the benefits of LTE-M, a low-power, wide area technology, for customers currently using 2G technologies for machine-to-machine communications.
"As LTE-M is rolled out, Rogers will provide its customers with clear and simple options to enhance their service experience when they choose to migrate and upgrade their 2G IoT devices and benefit from all the new capabilities provided by LTE-M," it said. "In addition, LTE-M will also enable future consumer IoT applications such as wearables, monitoring and tracking solutions."
Source: https://www.totaltele.com/501385/Rogers-to-launch-LTE-M-network-this-year-in-IoT-push