AT&T has signed an international LTE-M roaming deal with KPN, Orange and Swisscom, covering North America and Europe.
The deal covers AT&T's networks in the US and Mexico, KPN's in the Netherlands, Swisscom's in Switzerland and Orange's in France and Romania. Orange is set to introduce LTE-M in Belgium, Slovakia, Spain and Poland later this year, when those countries will also be included.
The GSM Association expects LTE-M networks to cover the whole of Europe by the end of 2020.
LTE-M is a low-power, wide-area (LPWAN) cellular technology. It does, however, consumer more power than LTE-based NB-IoT, with maximum download speeds of 1 Mbit/s versus 284 Kbit/s for NB-IoT. LTE-M also supports voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) technology for voice communications.
AT&T launched its LTE-M network in the US in September 2017, and its NB-IoT network followed in April 2019.
For more, see:
AT&T Buckles Down to Deploy NB-IoT in 2019
AT&T Pushes Cat M LTE for Cellular IoT in the Americas
— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading