Will Barker, Software Consultant at FarSite Communications Ltd.

At the point we were wanting to add support for NB-IoT and Cat-M1 to our devices, the protocols were relatively new and there was no global coverage available for them – it was at the start of a long rollout by the network providers. There was certainly no coverage at all in the region of our development centres and the only option to exercise the support that we were adding, was to travel to the few test centres that were setup by the network providers themselves. This was a huge overhead and not a feasible approach to developing complex support that needed in-depth development analysis as well as soak testing of a wide range of scenarios. The PicoLTE immediately enabled us to develop and test efficiently, verifying and debugging as and when we needed to, rather than booking a slot in the lab.

We needed a solution which gave us a local, simulated network, under our control, that we could rely on to present a cellular interface that was representative of network types as available, not only here in the UK, but worldwide. We needed to be able to test and commission devices prior to deployment, using network setups that truly represented the customer’s target network. We also needed to be able to test many corner cases, analyse power usage, verify reconnection support etc. all under our control – something that was clearly not possible with an external network provider.

The PicoLTE was recommended to us to meet these requirements and it delivered 100%. The training was thorough whilst being customised for us and use-case specific.

The PicoLTE proved to be very reliable and required minimal user intervention. That was only necessary when needing to change to a different configuration that would be required for a different use case scenario.

The support from nutaq was there whenever we needed it – which was not often due to the unit’s high reliability.

The PicoLTE enabled us to have a high degree of confidence in our device’s behaviour and how it managed network corner cases that would have occurred only intermittently in the target networks. It enabled us to deliver well proven and solid device support for the target protocols.