Berlin was the first station on the journey where we were able to spot traces of a NB-IoT base station.
Ever since the start of Commsolid, we’ve been working hard to bring up our modem IP. Especially around Christmas and in the following weeks up to the beginning of the MWC’17, we were working at full-steam. And it seems it paid out. On their way to Barcelona, our delegation had a stop in Berlin and was able to spot a NB-IoT base station using our prototyping platform running the modem software on an FPGA platform with a standard Raspberry PI attached as a host for running our visualization applications on it.
If you’d ask someone what’s their first thing to do when they get to Spain you probably receive a lot of different answers. But “getting out my network scanner” was probably not in that list yet.
But not only in Germany we were able to track traces of NB-IoT: Of course the first thing to try when we landed in Spain was to repeat our test and again we were able scan and find nearby cells belonging to Vodafone, Spain.
The remaining weekend before the great event’s start was mainly dedicated for preparing our booth and getting everything ready. But surely we cannot miss out the GSMA’s Global Mobile IoT Summit, so some of our colleagues attended there as well. And – you already might have guessed – they had our little network scanner with them right there as well.
Scanning for nearby NB-IoT networks probably does not count as “not paying attention” 😉
If you’re interested in our solution, we’d be glad to present it to you at our booth 7M32 in hall 7. Looking forward to meeting you there!