PoLTE Corporation today announced a new initiative with Sequans Communications whereby the two companies will prototype a joint solution integrating PoLTE positioning technology into Sequans’ Monarch LTE Platform, enabling ultra-low power, highly-accurate indoor and outdoor positioning capability for LTE for IoT devices.

In a continuous effort to lead the market by reducing volume size, improving energy efficiency and lowering overall device costs, Sequans sees value in PoLTE’s Lite-Touch virtual location architecture. While other competitors will have to increase their costs, size and energy consumption by embedding GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or other radios just for location purposes, the jointly developed next generation prototype solution of PoLTE and Sequans aims to eliminate these barriers by utilizing only the LTE radio for accurate indoor and outdoor location capabilities.

The Monarch LTE Platform is a highly optimized LTE-M/NB-IoT chip that has been adopted by leading device makers and operators around the world. Monarch is optimized to support low data use, ultra low-power, and cost-sensitive IoT applications, such as smart energy meters, industrial IoT sensors, asset trackers, smart city controllers and consumer wearables.

This solution is based on off-loading small amounts of modem data to PoLTE’s cloud servers where location engines accurately calculate positioning of devices. If a location engine was embedded on the device itself, processing power and memory would be constrained while adversely impacting battery life and device size. For mass adoption, PoLTE believes that the wireless device itself should be minimally impacted while adding highly valued location capabilities.

PoLTE’s solution delivers secure and persistent location of any LTE-enabled device indoors or outdoors seamlessly by leveraging the existing and ubiquitous LTE network. This sets the solution apart from other solutions that rely on GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and hybrid location solutions, which usually require at least two different technologies for outside and in-building tracking.