We’re currently in Poland for the festive season. Having seen the press releases about T-Mobile’s NB-IoT Open Lab and trials in Poland we brought along some of our NB-IoT gear on the off chance of being able to test T-Mobile’s offering at some point on our trials. We got far more than we bargained for! As far as I can tell there has been no press release to this effect as yet, but Miko from T-Mobile Polska took time out from his vacation to tell us that:
You can now find our NB1 service in 400 cities in Poland.
Warsawa, Radom and Łódź are OK.
Since we’re currently based in the Bałuty area of Łódź we thought we’d conduct a little experiment, using a T-Mobile NB-IoT SIM card from the Netherlands in our SODAQ Mbili Arduino compatible board, also from the Netherlands:
As you can hopefully see we’ve plugged in a u-blox Sara N211 NB-IoT comms module, and here is what we’ve discovered:
So near and yet so far! It looks as though we’ll have to wait for some pukka Polish T-Mobile NB-IoT SIMs to arrive in the post.
Meanwhile here’s T-Mobile’s Polish language video about their NB-IoT rollout across the globe, with a particular emphasis on Poland:
Narrowband-IoT is a breakthrough technology for solutions to the Internet of Things. It has been designed for two-way transmission of small amounts of data between devices. Watch the video and learn about specific application examples. Find out how you can reduce costs with this technology.
I’m heading back to England shortly, but before doing that I managed to try a quick test using a Pycom FiPy with Sequans Monarch NB-IoT firmware revision 40343:
Much the same story as with the u-blox module I’m afraid.