M2COMM brings industrial-grade LPWAN to Weightless community

The standard provides fully acknowledged 2-way communication offering best in class quality of service at data rates ranging from 200b/s to 100kb/s. It enables higher capacity than existing LPWAN and cellular technologies for uplink-dominated traffic with short-to-medium payload sizes. Using common commercially-available chipsets it will also support both stationary and mobile end devices by utilising low-power, innovative handover, cell re-selection and roaming methods. Other advanced reliability features include fast network acquisition, paging, FEC, ARQ, power control and adaptive channel coding.

The range and reliability, from challenging dense urban to rural environments, will exceed alternative LPWAN technologies using up to 17dBm output power. Whilst offering the promised performance, network reliability and security characteristics of 3GPP carrier-grade solutions, still unavailable for some considerable time, Weightless-P promises substantially lower costs and power consumption, less than 100uW in idle state compared to more than 3mW for the best cellular technologies and a price point equivalent to existing LPWAN solutions.

Derrick Wei, CEO, M2COMM, commented, “Weightless-P will breathe new life into an IoT market that is waiting on a reliable LPWAN technology. Many IoT sectors require reliability to be addressed with ultra-low energy wireless communications not accessible through operator services today. The slow adoption of wireless IoT solutions highlights a huge technology void that Weightless-P will address without requiring custom hardware”. Wei added "Our current technology deployments in the retail and industrial sectors are a powerful indication of the future success we anticipate for Weightless-P."

Professor William Webb, CEO, Weightless SIG, added: “We are delighted to welcome M2COMM to the group and very excited about what Weightless-P brings to the IoT market.” Asked how the technology impacts on existing Weightless technologies, Webb commented: “This new technology is bringing unique capabilities to the space, it fits perfectly within the Weightless stable of technologies”.

The Weightless-P Specification is expected to be published and available to SIG Members in Q4 2015. Weightless-P hardware, including development kits, is expected to be launched early 2016.