Decoding the Cellular IoT Acronym Alphabet Soup

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Decoding the Cellular IoT Acronym Alphabet Soup

	By Dan York Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and Senior Advisor at Internet Society
	March 02, 2016 Views: 8,998 Add Comment

Do you know what all these acronyms and abbreviations mean related to cellular networks and the Internet of Things (IoT)?

MTC, Cat-0, Cat-1, Cat-M1, LTE-M, NB-IoT, EC-GSM, LPWA, eDRX, PSM

I certainly didn’t… but Tuomas Tirronen at Ericsson Research wrote a blog post titled “Cellular IoT alphabet soup” where he explained all of this for those of us who might be interested.

My own interest has been and continues to be in the security and privacy challenges of the IoT but to explore those areas we also have to understand more about the underlying access technologies that will be used by IoT devices. Radio technologies such as those used in cellular networks are certainly one of the connection methods that will be used by the IoT.

I’m not ready to take a quiz on that alphabet soup that Tuomas writes about (or at least, I wouldn’t do well on any quiz!) but I do appreciate him writing that to help those of us who have not been following radio technology and terminology.

So much still to learn!

By Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and Senior Advisor at Internet Society — Dan is a Senior Advisor at the Internet Society but opinions posted on CircleID are his own. View more of Dan’s writing and audio here.
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