3G going away, when will 4G come to adafruit?

Adafruit cellular platform - SMS and IoT over celluar

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lionfood
 
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3G going away, when will 4G come to adafruit?

Post by lionfood »

With 3G due to sunset in Feb of 2022 is there any update on an adafruit 4G Fona device? There are a couple of projects I would like to get started on but simply don't want to invest significant time just to switch to something else. Really don't want to go with particle devices...they seriously overcharge ($0.44/Mb reminds me of days when prepaid cell mins were $0.5/min). I really just want an adafruit produced 4G device ideally.

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Dygear
 
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Re: 3G going away, when will 4G come to adafruit?

Post by Dygear »

I'd love to see a FONA (3G / 4G) modem attached to the RP2040 CPU. That much processing power, SRAM, and Flash is a very attractive package and opens up a lot more possibilities than the 2K of memory and 32K of ROM we currently get in the FONA 32u4. I've actually build a few emergency vehicle tracking devices from 9-1-1 agencies based on that chip and the Ulimate GPS FeatherWing (2919).

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: 3G going away, when will 4G come to adafruit?

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

We don't have any plans to go 4G as of now.

Cell phones are a heavily regulated industry. The more recent the technology is, the more time consuming and expensive it gets to obtain the certification documents and licenses. IIRC, the testing alone would be upwards of $100k.

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rskup
 
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Re: 3G going away, when will 4G come to adafruit?

Post by rskup »

Hey lionfood, if you don't need voice capability, I've been playing around with this 4G IoT board (based on the SIM7000G chip) and like it:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32964568200.html

Building a GPS tracker with it. Also would greatly prefer an Adafruit 4G board (love my FONA 3G), but have seen their $100,000 explanation in previous posts, so decided to try this board as my first 4G board, so far no complaints.

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