Alcatel-Lucent and Sequans Communications has announced that both companies are collaborating to support Orange in launching the ‘4G Kit for IoT’, a principal building block in the new Internet-of-Things prototyping platform. The '4G Kit for IoT' will be powered by Sequans’ LTE chipset with the technical implementation supported by Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. Sequans’ LTE chipset is incorporated into a three-band M.2 module for LTE bands 3, 7 and 20 and connects to a small form factor Olimex development board with plug-in antennas to enable IoT and M2M device makers to connect to Orange’s 4G LTE network.
According to Alcatel-Lucent, a limited series of 200 kits will be tested with innovation communities working on IoT projects as part of an effort to foster the creation of wirelessly connected objects, based on Orange’s 4G network, to deliver new services. Developers will be able to use the kit to make use of cloud services and mobility to design a new generation of IoT devices, taking full advantage of scalable resources such as remote computing, storage, and advanced services.
Jean-Luc Beylat, President of Bell Labs France
Bringing together operators, infrastructure and device manufacturers, start-ups and ‘tinkerers’, this project has illustrated Alcatel-Lucent’s engagement in Open Innovation, which will lead the acceleration of IoT devices using 4G technology. By making LTE technology accessible to innovation communities, we can trigger a change in the way services are designed. With unprecedented access to cloud services, connected objects can create a new ecosystem of distributed advanced services that will shape the future cloud and 5G
Georges Karam, CEO of Sequans
We are pleased to collaborate with Alcatel-Lucent on this important initiative. We are committed to making LTE efficient and cost-effective for IoT and M2M devices and our IoT-optimized LTE chipsets demonstrate this. We are very excited about the potential of Orange’s 4G Kit for IoT to spur the development of many new IoT devices.
