By Pablo Valerio – IoT Times
ALTAIR’S ILAN REINGOLD SHARES WITH IOT TIMES HIS VISION OF BETTER IOT DEVICES, BOTH FOR CONSUMER AND INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS, AND HOW THE COMPANY HELPS OEMS AND INTEGRATORS TO DELIVER BETTER CONNECTIVITY AND POWER SAVINGS.
IoT Times: Good morning Ilan, how is the Mobile World Congress going for you?
Ilan Reingold: The show is absolutely busy for us. We’re here for the entire week. We have two, three, four meetings at any given time, going back and forth between the different locations on the show floor, and see a lot of traction.
IoT Times: What can you tell me about Altair and its involvement in cellular IoT?
Ilan Reingold: We’ve been shipping our products for the cellular IoT market for the last few years based on our very mature cellular technology. We’ve been shipping CAT1 chipsets and started to ship LTE-M and NB-IoT chipsets about two years ago, and we really feel the market ramping up this year significantly with large volumes and very nice projections towards 2019.
IoT Times: You talk about LTE technology, and you mention LTE-M and NB-IoT. What do you think is going to be the main application for those technologies in the future? And, do you have any insight about how 5G networks are going to affect the business?
Ilan Reingold: The technology that we’re shipping now is part of the 5G IoT, so to speak, and a variety of applications and use cases and devices that we see is enormous, from smart city products such as smart meters for gas, water, and electricity to vehicle telematics. including trackers of all kinds, cold chain management, logistic trackers, and wearables. And we see traction in all of these markets. Some of these projects we have announced recently, such as the first cellular Garmin watch with Altair inside. And there are many other projects with our technology.
IoT Times: How important is the low power connectivity for IoT and how that works with cellular networks?
Ilan Reingold: The ability to reduce power consumption dramatically improves the user experience. Think about a children tracker, for example, or a smart watch, how different the experience is if you have to charge it once or twice a day, or if you can forget about it and charge it once a month? If you have a pet tracker that can be connected for one month, it is quite different than a pet tracker that you have to charge every day. And same applies for other use cases. We see, for example, the vehicle telematics market changing to devices that can operate on one battery for two years, three years, or more, actually eliminating the need to wire power to such devices in a car, reducing the total cost of the solution by hundreds of dollars. And, we see projects with smart-meters that are connected to the network and operate on the same battery for ten years or more.
IoT Times: What do you think is going to be the market for these technologies in the next ten years or so?
Ilan Reingold: The most significant trend that we see is to simplify the experience for device manufacturers, so that they can develop their own devices with small teams, with fast time to market. While we’re taking the burden off knowing what cellular is, knowing and taking care of the security hurdles, integrating all of that into our products and making the lives of our customers as easy as possible.
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