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The early January Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show is becoming an increasingly common place for cellular industry-targeting chip, software, and systems companies to ply their newest wares. Yet the late February Barcelona-based Mobile World Congress (MWC) show remains the dominant conference for wireless applications. This year's event takes place next week, February 22-25 to be exact. What should you expect to hear announced there? Glad you asked
LTE bandwidth improvements
4G LTE cellular data deployments are now pervasive worldwide; even low-end modern smartphones such as Motorola’s (Lenovo’s) first-generation Moto E and first- and second-generation G, which supported only 3G technologies, have been replaced by LTE-cognizant successors. However, LTE's implementation flexibility affords a steady stream of bandwidth improvements, assuming both the handset and carrier support them. Take LTE-A (LTE Advanced, specifically LTE Cat.4 and above, and also known as 4G+), for example, which employs techniques such as carrier aggregation (bundling multiple radio channels together) to boost transfer speeds. To-date adoption in the United States is limited, with more aggressive rollouts overseas; worldwide coverage is anticipated to steadily broaden in the coming years.
Carrier support means little without corresponding handset support, of course. 2014-era Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets comprehended entry-level “150 Mbps” Cat.4 LTE-A, for example; last year's “S” successors handle the “300 Mbps” Cat.6 upgrade. A flurry of LTE-A hardware announcements is anticipated at MWC, both in the form of upgrades to prior-generation hardware that handled only baseline LTE, and updates that support faster LTE-A speeds. As another indicator of where smartphones and cellular data-supportive tablets may soon be headed, check out Qualcomm’s latest announcement unveiled ahead of MWC last week. The Snapdragon X16 LTE modem and companion WTR5975 RF transceiver handle LTE-A all the way up to “1 Gbps” Cat.16, along with supporting channel bonding on both FDD and TDD LTE deployments for worldwide compatibility.
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I just saw this great blog on ebnonline. As you already know, I am very much aware of physical and security limitations of an IoT device. I always like to hear news about a company's rolling out chips to overcome the barrier to IoT adoption. FYI I had the previlege of reviewing a research paper on the author's proposed hardware-based security approaches to overcome current security limitations of the IoT systems. I hope to address IoT security issues in the supply chain management at a future date.
— Jjudith M. Myerson
The use of NFC makes it easier to set up an IoT device when a really strong password is in use for the network, as it takes out the tedium and error-prone nature of providing that password to the new device. Folks tend to use simpler passwords so they can remember them instead of looking them up each time. The NFC eliminates the need for either approach. That may result in folks using stronger passwords more often, which will improve security.
Every little bit helps.