CAT-M1 has arrived at SensorInsight!

We started testing our CAT-M1 solutions this week. It's been a work in progress, but we are finally comfortable with getting some of these sensors in our customer's hands. This particular sensor is a water leak sensor for a construction company. With projects all across North America, these sensors will be put to the test for connectivity and availability. We've had several requests for CAT-M1 or NB-IOT starting this year, so we really pushed to start getting some of these types of solutions out to market.

We are shipping LoraWAN solutions pretty regularly now, with our kits in farms, factories, restaurants, and even in-home monitoring. But even with Lora, sensors have just started to come into their own, with readily available sensors for all kinds of monitoring. Even with that, there are still a few gaps for some of the sensors that customers are asking us about regularly.

It's easy to get enamored with the hype of IoT, 5G, NB-IOT since there is a lot of potential to make your life easier, but you can also get sidetracked just as quickly. We have worked with, and even piloted many vendors providing 4G or 900 MHz solutions. We even took a pass at RPMA a couple of years back. Cost, availability of both the network and sensors, and control are the main factors that drove us to offer our own Lora network to our customers and allow us to provide the end-to-end support that they need.

We're excited about this new approach (for us) using CAT-M1 as an alternative or add-on (not replacement) to our solutions. I think we can all agree that we have been talking about this for too long. As a technologist, I usually wade cautiously into the hype, probably because I am often on the hook for solutions that are deliverable today! Maybe it's that I just don't have time for the hype that surrounds many of the technologies that will save us, 'someday.'