Nordic Semiconductor announced that it has received the first approval for its low-power cellular IoT solution on the real-time networks of major mobile operators through its customer sampling program. In addition, certification testing by infrastructure providers and operators is proceeding as planned, and the company plans to release fully certified general-purpose solution samples by mid-2018.

Svein-Egil Nielsen, CTO of Nordic Semiconductor, stated, “This will be a very important milestone for us,” and added, “We are very pleased to be able to support the nRF91 series, a low-power cellular IoT solution, to enable key market-leading customers to begin developing cellular IoT applications. This is a proud moment for everyone at Nordic Semiconductor who participated in the development of this innovative technology. We all have high expectations for this solution we are bringing to market, and we believe we will share these expectations with our customers.”

Low-power cellular IoT is expected to spread widely across numerous markets and application fields. For example, the applications are very diverse, including smart utility metering, asset and people (such as children) tracking, vehicle management, building security and safety, remote management, smart vending machines, retail, healthcare, medical monitoring, real-time traffic monitoring, wearables, indoor/outdoor GPS navigation, smart home technology, automotive (e.g., customized insurance based on actual driving data), industrial and agricultural automation.

Nordic Semiconductor's roadmap for cellular IoT includes highly integrated chipsets and advanced software supporting the upcoming 3GPP Release 13 LTE-M and NB-IoT. Optimized for power and size, the nRF91 series is specifically designed for emerging low-power cellular IoT applications, enabling ubiquitous network coverage and offering long battery life, low deployment and maintenance costs, scalability to billions of devices, and an ultra-small form factor for applicability across virtually any field.

LTE-M and NB-IoT are low-power, secure, reliable, and future-proof open standards defined by 3GPP for IoT applications where cost, size, and power are limited, and they are interoperable with cellular access technologies. The new cellular IoT market is projected to connect more than 1.5 billion devices by 2021, and these two technologies are expected to serve as growth engines expanding this market. Nordic expects these technologies to begin being applied for the first time in 2017 and expand widely between 2018 and 2019.