SIMCom Wireless Solutions recently sent two representatives, one commercial and one technical, to spend nearly three weeks in South Africa, visiting customers and conducting seminars in conjunction with their local distributor, Otto Wireless Solutions.
The company provides GSM, LTE and GPS modules which are incorporated into finished products like vehicle trackers, access control systems, and security systems, to enable remote communications to such devices. SIMCom boasts a very strong 5G roadmap, but of more relevance to the South African markets were the LTE Cat1 Bis modules and NB-IoT modules.
The company’s A7682E and A7672 modules have already established themselves in the local industry, with around 100 000 modules being supplied into the local market annually. However, as these modules age, designers are looking to the roadmap in order to understand what pin-compatible modules will be replacing them in the future.
This is also where it gets interesting – do future devices require 2g fallback? This fallback is provided on current devices; however, it comes at a significant financial premium when compared to new modules which no longer support this feature.
SIMcom has catered for this uncertainty by providing multiple devices, whilst maintaining footprint and pin compatibility across the product range, despite the newer devices becoming more streamlined towards IoT applications, and non-IoT features being removed. The company has also assured design engineers that the A7682E, their last platform to support 2G communication, will remain available for the foreseeable future, and is committed to providing a year’s notice when the product reaches its end-of-life.
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