Cellular Calls Home Appliances

　　Mainstream appliances will ship with cellular links next year. The data point was one of few specifics from a gathering of carriers and customers of cellular IoT here.

　　About half of Sears’ Kenmore-brand appliances now in development will have some form of wireless networking. About 10 percent of the company’s appliances now in use support Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo modules.

　　To avoid increasingly crowded home networks, the appliance maker is shifting some designs to LTE Category-M as modules hit the $10 price of today’s Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices. The links send about 22 different data readings to remote monitors.

　　“My techs can use that data to determine the health of the system very specifically over time,” said Chris McGugan, general manager of innovation for the appliance maker, speaking at the Mobile IoT Summit, part of the Mobile World Congress Americas event here.

　　The data helps Sears get valuable insights into how its products are used. It also cuts the number of times that it needs to send out repairmen.

　　In addition, Sears hopes that LTE will automate the process of connecting appliances. “Most consumers don’t understand how to work their Wi-Fi … on average, only 11–12 percent of connected devices actually get on the home network,” said McGugan.

　　The OEM’s job also has its challenges. Major appliances typically have a two-year design cycle and can carry as much as $50 million in machining costs, he added.

　　Cellular IoT is also getting traction in asset tracking, often coupled with Bluetooth in delivery vehicles or factory-floor systems, said Bob Proctor, chief executive of Link Labs. “Generally speaking, you have to be able to work with many technologies,” he said, noting that his company uses LoRa and Wi-Fi as well as LTE Cat-M and Bluetooth.

　　Overall, the promise of cellular IoT seems huge, but the market is still in its infancy, making up less than 3 percent of carrier revenues today, according to a representative of Nokia, which co-sponsored the event.

　　By 2026, as many as 3.8 billion LTE-based IoT nets may be in operation, according to the GSMA, a cellular trade group that hosted the event. Carriers have launched 17 cellular IoT offerings worldwide to date, a total expected to rise to 35 by March.

　　The 10-Mbit Cat-M standard, which carriers can support with a software upgrade to their nets, is further along with two live networks in North America. The lower-power Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) variant, which supports 1-Mbit/s links, is not as advanced in interoperability testing and requires carriers to adopt some new hardware. NB-IoT is expected to go live in North America next year, and rollouts are in the works in China, Korea, and Europe.

　　Carriers see the opportunity as huge and still somewhat undefined. “We cannot extend beyond our traditional coverage into buildings and underground with massive improvements in dB,” said Cameron Coursey, a vice president of product development for AT&T, which has a live Cat-M network.

　　Carriers need to build core nets tailored for IoT “and strip out management layers only needed for smartphones for greater efficiency,” said Mark Bartolomeo, a vice president for IoT at Verizon, which is in trails with Cat-M and NB-IoT. Meanwhile, “MCU [vendors are] rewriting their software to handle cellular — the idea of retrofitting devices to connect to the network is going away,” he said.

　　A T-Mobile executive claimed that cellular IoT is “remarkably better in performance than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in a noisy environment.” However, Bartolomeo of Verizon noted that the consumer IoT market is plagued with generally expensive, complex, and fragmented platforms, including eight separate products from Verizon alone.

　　Cellular IoT module costs are already below $10 and will approach $5 soon, said Georges Karam, chief executive of baseband chip supplier Sequans. “You will see this technology evolve very quickly.”