For a customer we're trying to see if we can build an IoT solution with nrf9160 to periodically send a status update to the cloud. Unfortunately, the devices are typically in the basement. Connecting from a basement over LTE-M/NB-IoT with nrf9160 has been unsuccessful sofar. We tested in three basements with no luck (normal house basement and two office building garages). As this is one of the main use cases for IoT: stuff in a basement sends a status update once in a long time we were quite surprised that it didn't work. Any hints you can give us? The antenna we tried is an 20 cm tall LTE antenna. Is this a problem with the providers not enabling NB-IoT/LTE-M features for wall-penetration? I failed to find any options to boost the receive or send amplifiers? Are there better antennas that we should try?
