Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics , and today it's all about mobile networks and figuring out if and where your IoT device can connect to them.

To see if your device works with the mobile networks around you, the workflow is this. Simply find your desired device online, find the specification sheet, learn what the mobile band and network it likes to connect to, and then see if that particular network and band is covered in your particular location. Let me demonstrate this process with the PiCom GPY that I have right here, and I'll see if I can find out if I can connect it to a mobile network that is around me right now.

When it comes to IoT, they often run on narrowband cellular standards. The two main narrowband cellular standards that you will often see used are the NB-IoT and the LTE-CAT-M1. Now keep it in mind that LTE, ergo long-term evolution, is for our purposes here effectively a 4G technology.

So based here in Australia, our main providers are Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone. Our main network is 4G LTE, and the bands that we have most in our country are B7 and B28. So first step is to find a specification sheet for this particular PiCom GPY, and in this case all the information we need will be on our Core Electronics website for this particular device.

So I will jump into our website, find the PiCom GPY, and then scroll down just a little bit to the GPY features and details. And now from this section we can pull some information. We can see only Vodafone and Telstra are the available carriers, must always be used with LTE-CAT-M1 or NB-I. We could also see all the low-power bands that it likes to use, which in this case importantly is 28, which we have a lot of in Australia. And this should be all the information we need to figure out if this guy can work where I am in Newcastle, Australia right now.

Every country is different, but I will demonstrate good ways to figure out if you have connectivity ergo network coverage in your local area no matter where you are in the globe. Jump onto a website called CellMapper. CellMapper is a global crowdsourced cellular tower and coverage mapping service that just absolutely rules.

So jumping into the CellMapper website and centering in on my location, I will type in these details. Keep in mind that LTE, long-term evolution, is effectively 4G technology. So we can see now that around the Newcastle area there is connection available for this. So this device would work perfectly well within this location, with this network, and each of these dots is an actual user who is connected to a particular network. Thus, if you see a dot with one of your provider's network and band, you can know with 100% certainty that your particular device could connect to the mobile network around the same kind of place.

Another good way of finding out whether you have coverage or not for your IoT device is by jumping onto your provider's particular website and sussing out their coverage maps. On screen now is an image of Telstra's coverage in Australia. 5G represented in pink, you can see it's around the cities, 4G basically all around the edges, and 3G is in there as well. Now there are similar maps for Vodafone and Optus.

Now below in the description will be a link to this coverage map and that of Vodafone and Optus. Also linked there will be CellMapper and another third-party global coverage checker called nPerf, which is third-party but it's good for understanding global coverage, so no matter where you are in the world, you'll be able to run through and do a similar thing as I am here. Now data demonstrated in these end up as bubble maps, but it is pretty reliable. So you can see most of the things I've linked in the description below. If you want to jump to our Core Electronics website and see theIn the actual article, there are some extra resources that I've linked. So that is it for today. If you enjoy our content, come like and subscribe. Until next time, stay cozy.