General Question about International Compatibility

[SteveLaser]

This is a general question about selling our modem-enhanced products internationally.
We use an NRF9160 (NB-IoT), but we have some of our devices equipped with older Telit modems (LTE-M).

We have inquiries from global companies and they need to know if our products will work in their area of the world, but we do not know what to say, as we cannot test them.
We also cannot find out if their carriers will work with our modems (as far as we know).

Currently, we send modems with SIM cards included, and tested in production, rather than asking our customers to provide their own. This way, the device is known to work.
We do send some devices internationally, but only if we can confirm our in-built sim cards will work in their areas and with their carriers.

How can we know, ahead of time, that our products are safe to ship to other areas of the world, and that they will work?

I know Nordic provided this simple compatibility matrix, but we are unsure how to really apply the knowledge, and it seems thin to determine international compatibility.

Thank you for any insight.

[Ashley Adamson]

The best response to other global companies to know if your products will work for them is to to say,  "yes, go ahead" and then endeavour to resolve any difficulties that arise.

[Hakon]

Hello,

nrf9160 will work everywhere where there is lte-m/nb-iot coverage. It depends on what carrier the SIM card uses.

You can contact the carrier directly or with MNVO SIM ask what networks they are using and where they have coverage. Field testing will give the best answer.

[Achim Kraus]

Let me add my experience:

It works quite well, and in my experience it's mainly the SIM cards, which causing issues, and in rare cases some base stations (I would consider them as "deprecated" or "requires an update").

For Europe, the US and Australia you will find some MNO, which works well, and some, which are "in between" deploying new software or updating the hardware of their base-stations. If you're faced some of them in the region you're interested in, you may write the PLMN to the "ban"-list of the SIM (forbidden operators).

Outside of that, the "ongoing base station updates" seems to take longer.

The main issues, I was faced:

- SIM card has only LTE subscription but no LTE-M. It's said, that this works with old LTE base stations (you may detected that for LTE/LTE-M by the missing PSM feature) but on updates your devices may go offline. The dangerous thing here is, that some report "it's working", but don't want to see the risk.

- NB-IoT base station doesn't use proper repetition factors and that causes to fail entering PSM mode. In some regions pretty nasty, the one base station works well, but if the device changes to an other base station of the same MNO, the battery gets drained.

All in all:

If you want to deploy your devices, I would recommend, that you read the basic radio information frequently and use that to analyze issues and if work around are really effective.