Rijkswaterstaat and Utility Connect Sign Agreement on LTE-M MCX at 450Mhz Frequency

Rijkswaterstaat, the executive agency of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management in The Netherlands and Utility Connect, a provider of secure, reliable and closed wireless machine-to-machine data communication connection have signed an agreement to jointly conduct research and robustness tests into maritime and nautical usability of data communication with LTE-M at 450Mhz frequency (LTE450), the coming two years, for several use cases and under varying (meteorological en situational) conditions.

A LTE450 base station and antennas have now been placed and activated on the test platform of the Offshore Expertise Center to enable experimental pilot studies in the field. A seaworthy marker buoy is also exprected to arrive soon, which will be expanded into a smart measurement buoy with various sensors and means of communication. In addition to these IoT applications, mission-critical voice and other mission-critical applications (MCX) that are possible with the terminal and control equipment available on the market, will be tested.