T-Mobile for Business announced the availability of Roambee BeeAware, its asset tracking solution, on a Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) network in the United States.
The T-Mobile BeeAware solution is available for $10 per device per month, which also includes portal access and NB-IoT data.
T-Mobile’s NB-IoT network provides significant security advantages over technologies that operate on unlicensed airwaves such as LoRAWAN, BLE and RFID, among others.
A single truckload of high-value goods may contain 100s of asset trackers and travel miles. Battery-life is critical. NB-IoT utilizes a power saving mode, smaller data payloads, and typically longer reporting intervals all of which translate to lower power consumption.
“This is great news for companies that need an asset tracking platform but it also marks a new era for T-Mobile for Business,” Mike Katz, executive vice president of T-Mobile for Business, said.
Roambee’s BeeAware asset tracker easily attaches to shipments, pallets, or individual assets to provide item-level location and temperature monitoring indoors, in-transit, and outdoors –leveraging T-Mobile’s NB-IoT network.
Unlike CAT-M, it operates in the shoulder-lane next to the dedicated LTE spectrum so that data doesn’t have to compete with other, larger network traffic. IoT devices on NB-IoT simply don’t need to operate on intensive LTE networks, and so don’t require expensive batteries.
