Cellular IoT Kit Vendors: GSM, LTE, 5G, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT

This page covers Cellular IoT Kit vendors used for GSM, LTE, 5G, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT based cellular technologies. It mentions popular manufacturers or vendors of cellular IoT kits with their benefits (i.e. advantages) and features.

Introduction

Cellular IoT kits are developed to provide cellular and LPWAN network connectivity as per deployed technologies in the region. The common low power cellular technologies include EC-GSM-IoT, LTE-M, NB-IoT, and 5G NR (New Radio) etc. The common LPWAN technologies include LoRaWAN, Sigfox, DASH7, Weightless etc.

There are many applications of cellular IoT kits, which include environmental monitoring, smart city applications, smart building systems, precision agricultural applications, Oil/Gas industries, digital signage, cloud computing and so on.

The kit can be used to interface various sensors such as temperature, humidity, soil, ambient light, oil/Gas, motion, proximity, level, load, acceleration etc. as per specific applications.

Advantages or Benefits of Cellular IoT Kit

The figure depicts a cellular kit and its connectivity diagram. As shown, the kit connects with a cellular network using operating frequency and transmit power as per RF planning. It can be connected with a cloud platform via a cellular gateway. MQTT or HTTP protocols are used to connect the cellular kit with the IoT cloud platform.

A number of cloud platforms have been developed by many companies for providing IoT services. Mobile applications and/or web applications are developed for remote monitoring of the IoT system and its parameters.

Following are the generic advantages or benefits of the cellular kits:

• It helps to connect seamlessly with a cellular network from anywhere as per supported cellular technologies.
• It can connect using MQTT/HTTP protocol with popular cloud platforms such as Google Cloud, Amazon AWS cloud, Microsoft Azure, ThingSpeak IoT cloud and so on.
• The kit consumes low power and hence supports long battery life. Some IoT kits can be powered using an AC to DC adapter.
• The kits are usually designed at a lower cost so that everyone can afford it for device-to-cloud connectivity applications.
• It offers a secured connection with a cloud server or end applications or third-party services.
• It interfaces various sensors and devices using UART, SPI, I2C, USB, I2S, ADC (Analog input), GPIOs etc.

Manufacturers or Vendors of Cellular IoT Kits

The following table mentions manufacturers or vendors of cellular IoT kits for various technologies.