Hello there,
I lived in Australia and rumour said by 2020 Telstra will stop 3G. I am wondering when will electron or even boron support 4G?
Thanks
The initial indication of a start to shutdown in 2020 was made by a Telstra spokesman in 2016. The following article indicates that this will commence with the 2100 MHz band in 2020 and will take a few years to completely shut down.
I am equally interested given the cost of Particle services (A$5 for 3 Mbytes per month) and data only plans (A$10 for 1 Gbyte per month). While I understand the drivers for conventional IoT with large number of low data rate sensors/systems I have a need to transmit one or two 1 Mbyte files from a small number of systems each day.
I would be interested to understand whether the Boron 3G modem can be made to run on 4G networks (unlikely ?). Similarly, can the Boron LTE operate on standard 4G networks as against LTE-M1 (again unlikely ?)
There is unlikely to be a device with standard 4G/LTE (cat 1 and higher), as is used by mobile phones. The modem is too large and expensive to be practical for an IoT device, and the high bandwidth used for mobile apps isn’t the typical use case of an Electron or Boron.
The Boron LTE, which uses LTE Cat M1, works on Telstra, with a 3rd-party SIM card. It’s an issue of carrier agreements, SIM cards, carrier certification, etc. that prevents the Boron LTE with the Particle SIM card from working in locations outside of the United States at this time.
There is an Electron LTE (LTE Cat M1), however it is only available to existing enterprise customers who have deployed the Electron 2G or 3G, and is only available in large quantities. New designs should use the Boron LTE or B Series SoM instead.
And there is also the E Series LTE, which will continue to be manufactured. It’s the 2nd generation MCU (STM32F205) with the u-blox SARA-R410M-02-B, the same modem as the Boron LTE.
Thanks - as I suspected. I am working my way through transferring existing functionality from Photon to Boron and adding remote data transfer.
The cost of LTE-M1 data compared to cheap high volume 4G data plans means I will have to limit real-time transfer to the low res 5 Hz data and recover the 200 Hz data once recorder is back in lab. I will have to look at using mesh or BT to transfer data out of the box.
I am very conscious that my use case is not Particle’s main game but the development environment still makes it attractive.
Hi Rick, please see the attached file. Is that the one that you are talking about?
Would Boron LTE compatible with asset tracker shield? I need the gps feature so that I can send the geolocation.
Thanks
Please see this post about using a Gen3 device with GPS. It’s probably less expensive than buying the Asset Tracker board and box.
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