11 March 2016, Berlin, Germany — GosuncnWelink Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as GosuncnWelink), and Altair Semiconductor (referred to as Altair) today announced the co-launch of the long-term evolution (LTE) Cat.1 module ME3610, which is based on Altair’s platform. Thanks to its low power consumption, low rate and low cost characteristic, ME3610 helps meet demand for the burgeoning number of IoT connections.  

Altair is a semiconductor design company headquartered in Israel with technologies that range from chip design to system solutions. Altair first launched a single-mode LTE chipset, dedicated to the support of Cat.1 with low cost and low power consumption, in the second half of 2015. This new launch sees GosuncnWelink partner with Altair to release a new and improved version of the LTE Cat.1 product: ME3610. ME3610 supports a download (DL) 10 Mbps / upload (UL) 5 Mbps LTE data service and can be widely used in IoT application scenarios. ME3610 is expected to disrupt the market. 

ME3610 is in a 30*30mm LCC form factor and it is the new member of GosuncnWelink’s vLink module family. It is pin-to-pin compatible with numerous long-term evolution / Wideband Code Division Multiple Access/ evolutiondata only (LTE/WCDMA/EV-DO) modules which provide users with a flexible choice and design. ME3610 module gives full play to the advantages of Altair’s module in power save mode, radio frequency (RF) optimisation and hardware security encryption mechanism, bring superior performance for customers in the IoT industry.

ME3610 supports four versions of the LTE band which include the Chinese version (Band1/3/8), the Japanese and South Korean version (Band1/3/8/19/26), the North American version (Band2/4/12) and the European version (Band3/8/20). It enables customers to quickly deploy the LTE Cat.1 solution in the global market and provides reliable embedded IoT communication for smart metering, point of sale (POS), fleet management and smart agriculture industries, which require a low-power and low cost communication technology.

 “We are very excited that ZTE sees the benefits of our FourGee-1160’s low power consumption, superb performance and IoT-targeted feature set,” said Eran Eshed, Co-founder and VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Altair. “ZTE’s ME3610 IoT-optimized module, with Altair’s true CAT-1 chipset inside, is the perfect engine for key applications, such as smart meters, vehicle telematics, security systems and wearables.”

“At present, the mainstream market has showed strong interest in LTE machine type communication(MTC) products and several major customers have already carried on design-in work on our products,” said Wang Peng, VP of GosuncnWelink. “There are more than 480 commercial LTE networks deployed worldwide and most industrial IoT applications do not need super-fast bandwidth. The ME3610, which was co-launched by GosuncnWelink and Altair, is more suitable for large-scale MTC applications and we will also research and launch more products to further support LTE MTC technology.”

According to an IDC forecast, the size of the global IoT market will increase from 4.8 trillion US dollar in 2012 to 8.9 trillion US dollars by 2020. At this time, it is estimated that there will be 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. LTE Cat.1/MTC technology with low power consumption and low cost will accelerate the deployment speed of LTE in the IoT industry. According to chief analyst at Machina Research, Godfrey Chua, LTE MTC is expected to account for 10 percent of IoT device connection solutions by 2023.   

To keep pace with the ‘everything is connected’ era, GosuncnWelink will closely cooperate with the upstream and downstream industry chain and bring real value to industry customers with its all-standard industrial wireless communication modules.