impCellular announced!

Announcements
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https://www.electricimp.com/cellular/cellular-iot-reinvented/

Just in case you’ve not checked the website recently - we just announced impCellular, the first industrial grade all-in-one cellular IoT solution.

When I say industrial grade, I really mean it. The impC001 even has ECC on all its memories. This is really solid stuff that you can rely on - and it’s as easy to use as all imps :slight_smile:

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Also you can pre-order devices here https://store.electricimp.com/collections/impcellular

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Is this something that also requires a SIM card and a data only plan with a cellular service? How does that part work?

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That’s all included; see https://3psnnz1ja4lg3qllb62xd6yg-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/impCellular_Product_Brief.pdf for pricing

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Great news! Indeed.
I wold like to order some but:

  1. is it registered at State Department to ship outside US? I remember 2013 story when that cause some daly for imp001,
  2. what is necessary to know to start negotiations with our Latvian cell network provider?
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Thank you, Electric Imp! This is amazing news. This is a game-changer, for sure!

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Europe is ok on export control. Generally though, fedex type services work best for customs vs normal postal services.

In Latvia, both Tele2 and Telia are supported, and you don’t need to speak to your supplier. You are not using their SIM.

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Thanks, Hugo. Great!
Cellular imp will change and simplify a lot of designs and applications.
I will pre-order.

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Great news ! I was waiting for this after discovering some details on the Dev site.
Few practical questions:

  • do you have a list of supported carriers in the European Union ?
  • do you intent to stick to the M.2. form factor for future modules ? In itself a good choice but what is your experience on reliability of the connection ? I"m asking because we had to replace a good portion of our IMP001s based (pilot) products with soldered on IMP002s due to random connectivity problems in the SD Card connector.
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There are too many carriers to list, but PM with countries and we can provide the details.

We intend to use m2 for the standalone products, yes. M2 is very resilient (designed for permanent-fit of things like SSDs) hence the screw fixing etc. SD is rather more a consumer connector and the quality of the sockets varies hugely.

We have not seen any issues with M2 in the past year.

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super excited about this! thanks for the great news!

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Super cool. Looking forward to see a list of countries covered by the service an which service providers are supported per country.

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super excited! keep it up EI!

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If you need carrier detail, then PM. We can provide this :slight_smile:

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Are there any plans to have a WiFi module with the same form factor and connector, so that a board could use a cellular or WiFi module interchangeably?

What is the range of the narrowband cellular like - should we expect usability past limits of where normal 3G/4G cell phones work?

Thanks

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No plans for a wifi version, no - but that’s possible with some upcoming things :slight_smile:

Generally NB (and cat M1) have improved range over 2G/3G/4G; the design was for range. There are some (simulated) studies eg https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8108182/

Various people also believe that the difference between NB and CatM effective coverage will be minimal…

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The breakout boards for IMPC001 explicitely mention -US region. Does that mean they won’t work in Europe ? Just need to be sure before ordering one…

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On the order page you can pick which region impC001 you would like in your breakout board kit.

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https://www.electricimp.com/cellular/cellular-iot-reinvented/ has now been updated with both the pricing table (was in the impCellular product brief) and the carrier list, which shows all the carriers currently supported.

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