May 27, 2021

LTE-M Roaming: What’s the Status?

When it comes to IoT, you want to be able to use your devices globally. Your solution might be operating in many different areas of the world, or your company may be growing, and you want to ensure you are able to operate globally in the future. Having the right roaming agreements in place ensures that you will have the capabilities you need.  

At Tele2 IoT we are hard at work on increasing the LTE-M roaming footprint, together with the Tele2 roaming department, as well as other operators. But while LTE-M is available to our customers in some regions, it is not yet available everywhere. Why is that? The bottom line is that we want to make sure certain LTE-M features are functioning and approved by the different operators we have agreements with. For example, we are carefully testing power saving mode before launching in a market, because this is a key feature of LTE-M for our customers. We’re basically doing a sanity check on the roaming networks – we know a lot of our customers are very eager to use LTE-M and they want to use it in many different markets so rolling it out in a controlled way ensures that it works as it should and also that we don’t run into problems down the road – and that our customers don’t either. To put it another way, customers want the advantages of LPWA (low-power, wide area) technology, and we want to offer it to them.  

It is important that we establish the LTE-M connection with the different operators and that we have long-term agreements in place. In order to do so in a way that ensures the long-term success of LTE-M roaming for our customers, we are being pragmatic and careful, checking each and every agreement to make sure they work. In other words, we are future proofing right out of the gate.

Mattias Hahne Product Manager IoT LPWA & Professional Services

So, where are we today when it comes to LTE-M roaming agreements? We are already offering LTE-M across Sweden, and we have also rolled it out in five other roaming networks: Netherlands KPNNetherlands VodafoneUS AT&TBelgium Orange, and Switzerland Swisscom. We will be rolling out roaming agreements for LTE-M in a further ten markets this year.  During 2022, we are aiming to connect at least 25 new networks. This may go faster when we see global networks rolling out LTE-M and it becomes a natural part of our roaming partners’ mobile networks.  

What all this means to you is that, together with 5G, massive IoT is being enabled by LTE-M. It is part of the 5G standard and will be one of the pieces in the 5G puzzle and massive machine to machine communication.  

If you would like to learn more about how IoT technologies can help your business, please get in touch

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