I get a lot of questions around LTE-M – our customers are very eager to use it and are eager to know when roaming agreements will be in place in different regions. This is particularly important when it comes to customers who are doing Covid tracking, especially in Asia.
Right now, LPWA technologies like LTE-M and NB-IoT are often the right solution due to battery capabilities and power consumption – and with LTE-M, stability. But of course, there could be other options that are more suitable – it all depends on their needs and what they want to do.
There are times, of course, when a customer wants to do something and it’s not possible. Often, customers want to be able to reach their devices from the internet, but that’s a completely insecure way of building your IoT setup, so for security reasons we don’t support it. This sometimes needs a bit of extra explaining as to why using the public internet to communicate with their devices is going to be nothing but headaches.
Security is always important when talking about IoT and emerging technologies such as LTE-M and 5G, because these mean we’re heading into massive IoT – and that the attack surface will increase.
Normally, when I talk about security, I pinpoint several factors. You don’t want to read in the newspaper that your cloud was compromised. Basically, you want to stay away from the public internet, and you want secure communication. If you want to go for high level security as step number two in a big IoT deployment, you consider it from day one. If you deploy 5000 devices and then start thinking about security, you will have to re-do the whole thing, so it’s important to think about it from the beginning – this will save a lot of effort, a lot of time. If you’re connecting to an open internet connection, nearly anyone can influence it. There are a few examples of temperature readers that were compromised, and all the data was fake – you don’t want this to happen to you.