MulteFire introduces another contender in the IoT space for LPWAN

The MulteFire Alliance was formed in December 2015 with founding members Nokia and Qualcomm, joined by Ericsson and Intel, to promote MulteFire as an LTE-based technology for small cells operating in unlicensed and shared spectrum. The alliance has since grown to include close to 30 members. Now, "the MulteFire Alliance is adapting LTE IoT to operate in the unlicensed spectrum to expand beyond mobile broadband and high-performance IoT supported by MulteFire 1.0,” wrote Hao Xu, principal engineer/manager at Qualcomm, in a blog post. “This will in turn bring new opportunities for private LTE networks and enable LPWA (low-power wide-area) use cases, leveraging narrowband LTE IoT technology."