LTE-M coverage @ free sight

[RUL]

Hi

According to your Blog "LTE-M vs NB-IoT Field Test: How Distance Affects Power Consumption" the maximum distance between the base station and the Dev-Kit was 12km.


Do you know:

- The maximum distance for nRF9160 in free sight (e.g out at sea)?
  (The coverage maps from the network providers shows up to 40km from the mainland)

- The limiting factor for achieving longer distances using nRF9160?

- The maximum theoretical distance for LTE-M?


/BR Rul

[Michal]

Hello,

Unfortunately, I don't think that we have any more extensive test than the one that you have seen already.

The limiting factor for achieving longer distances using nRF9160?

The limiting factors are probably signal power and antennas.

The maximum theoretical distance for LTE-M?

I found a nice paper Samir Dawaliby, Abbas Bradai, Yannis Pousset. In Depth Performance Evaluation of LTE-M for M2M Communications. The 12th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, WiMob’16, Oct 2016, New York, United States. hal-01451229.

On page 5 there is a following graph:

According to which, 60 km is the absolute maximum distance.

Best regards,

Michal