Sony’s Altair Semiconductor will supply modem chips for AT&T’s $7.50 Category M1 LTE modules, which the carrier announced late last week. Altair was also AT&T’s modem vendor for its Category 1 LTE modules, which were priced at $14.99.
“A&T has been a very strong partner for us in the IoT space,” said Altair co-founder Eran Eshed. He said both the AT&T modules were designed by Taiwan’s Wistron NeWeb Corporation. Eshed said he thinks it will take six to nine months for a Cat M1 ecosystem to develop, and that the lower-cost technology will be appropriate for a range of IoT use cases, including wearables, telematics and deployments in buildings that are hard to penetrate.
