Carnegie Technologies recently launched a new research and development lab that is exploring projects in hybrid satellite/cellular networking as well as agricultural “internet of things” projects.
Carnegie Technologies is the developer of a converged platform for Wi-Fi and cellular, and the company’s CTO Paul Struhsaker is in charge of the new Carnegie Labs. Carnegie’s focus, he said, is to work on solutions that make use of multiple wireless technologies – in some cases, to accomplish the types of use cases that are talked about in a “5G” context. The venture capital-backed company was started in 2010 as a technology incubator.
As it explores research projects, Struhsaker said, Carnegie Labs “[looks] at a lot of different things – some of them we carry through incubation and we decide there isn’t a big enough market for it. Other things, we take them all the way through.”
Carnegie Labs’ Satbridge project is one example. The product is somewhat like an access point for satellite connectivity, designed to allow regular cellular phones to access satellite services through a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi link and also improve the reliability of the satellite connection through a combination of a unique antenna plus satellite tracking. It utilizes a switched beam antenna, Struhsaker added, which results in a link that has on the order of five to six decibels of improvement; Carnegie has been collaborating with Southwest Research Institute on the antenna design and testing. Satbridge is likely to be used as back-up communications for far-flung enterprise operations, emergency services and consumers who are out boating, hiking or otherwise adventuring in back country situations where they are unlikely to have reliable cellular coverage, Struhsaker said.
Carnegie is also in the process of developing an IoT platform that utilizes LoRa technology, but puts the company’s own stamp on protocols. The company is putting together its first agricultural IoT product, “Animal Tracker,” which is designed to help farmers and ranchers locate and monitor their animals. The tag provides some physical health information about the animals as well as it position, Struhsaker said. It is also designed to last two years, he noted, which is not typical for many commercial IoT products – trackers can have an impractically short life for the use case.
Struhsaker said Carnegie is beginning field trials now and is in discussions with companies on a global basis to deploy its IoT solutions. Carnegie expects agricultural IoT to be a growing sector in 2017.
The company put together a series of 2017 predictions that include:
- 5G trials this year “will show promise of the technology but will unveil issues with the targeted 27 GHz frequency band.”
- Comcast will launch a mobile virtual network operator service and participate in the next round of federal spectrum auctions.
- Cable industry efforts to utilize both cellular and Wi-Fi “will likely be based on a Cable Labs-derived standard, which will arrive well ahead of [Third Generation Partnership Project] standards efforts.”
- “All major providers will move to a deep fiber to the curb/pedestal and wireless connection to the premise model,” a hybrid of fiber and wireless that Carnegie says is more cost-effective than direct fiber connections. The exception, the company says, will be Altice.
- Security issues will be a major stumbling block for the home “internet of things” market, and security “will take center stage in consumer and commercial IoT, especially access to critical systems in vehicles of all types.”
- Carnegie also posits that “despite great fanfare for a number of competing standards for public IoT networks in the unlicensed frequency bands, 2017 will see one or more players fail. Non-cellular IoT is more likely to be successful in private network deployment limited to campus/factory, city or farm/ranch coverage.”
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