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This week we’re looking at the state of 5G RedCap and what it means for cellular IoT, why MSPs should offer wireless failover solutions, the top questions about eSIM, and more!

The carriers are quietly filling in a gap that has existed in cellular IoT for years. AT&T went nationwide with 5G RedCap last July, covering more than 200 million points of presence — and by this year, T-Mobile and Verizon are both rolling out their own RedCap deployments as well. RedCap, short for Reduced Capability, is a 5G specification from 3GPP Release 17 designed specifically for IoT devices that need more than NB-IoT or LTE-M can offer, but don't actually need the full performance envelope of 5G. It tops out around 150 Mbps downlink, runs on simplified antenna configurations and narrower channel bandwidth than standard 5G, and draws meaningfully less power. For a lot of industrial and utility applications — video-enabled monitoring, smart grid sensors, connected cameras, asset tracking with real-time telemetry — that profile is a much better fit than anything that's been available before.

The reason this matters is that cellular IoT has always had a frustrating gap in its connectivity lineup. NB-IoT and LTE-M work well for low-power, low-bandwidth use cases — a temperature sensor reporting every fifteen minutes, a water meter sending daily totals. On the other end, full 5G NR offers extreme throughput but at hardware costs and power consumption that disqualify it from most IoT budgets and form factors. The space in between — video surveillance at fixed infrastructure, factory-floor equipment with continuous monitoring requirements, logistics tracking that needs both location and condition data — has traditionally been served by LTE Cat-4 modules that lack the spectral efficiency, latency profile, and longevity of a 5G-native solution. RedCap was designed to fill exactly that gap, and the network infrastructure is now catching up to the specification.

Hardware availability has been the constraint, not network readiness. That's shifting. Semtech's FX86E RedCap modem is among the first production-ready modules targeting this tier, and it ships with LTE fallback built in — meaning devices can be deployed today in areas where RedCap coverage isn't yet dense without losing connectivity. That fallback capability matters a lot for IoT project planning, where device refresh cycles are measured in years and operators can't afford to bet hardware decisions on carrier rollout timelines. RedCap modules are projected to cost roughly 20–30% more than equivalent LTE Cat-4 hardware, but deliver two to three times the real-world performance. For applications where the choice was previously between underpowered LPWAN and overbuilt 5G, that cost premium is easy to justify.

One of the recurring themes in successful IoT connectivity planning is that matching the technology to the application's actual requirements — bandwidth, power budget, latency, coverage continuity — matters far more than picking whatever is newest. A lot of failed or over-budget IoT deployments trace back to connectivity decisions made too early or on the wrong criteria: choosing LTE because it was familiar, or specifying NB-IoT because it was cheap, without stress-testing either choice against what the application actually demands over its full operating life. RedCap's value isn't that it's the best connectivity for everything — it's that it closes off a class of compromises that IoT architects have been forced to make for the past several years, and does so within a standardized 5G framework with a viable long-term carrier roadmap behind it.

For teams currently designing or refreshing deployments in the mid-bandwidth IoT tier, the practical question is when to start certifying modules and locking in connectivity. The carrier infrastructure is real and expanding. The first certified modules are shipping. AT&T has already quietly decommissioned its NB-IoT network and pointed customers toward LTE-M and RedCap as the forward path — which is a useful signal about where the market is heading. Now is the time to be evaluating RedCap hardware rather than waiting for coverage to mature further. The window between "the infrastructure exists" and "everyone is competing for the same module supply" tends to be shorter than it looks from the outside.

For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), delivering reliable connectivity has evolved from a basic service expectation to a mission-critical business imperative. When your clients experience network downtime, they don't just lose internet access—they lose revenue, productivity, and customer trust.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Matthias Wagner, Founder and CEO of Flux, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss AI-assisted hardware design for IoT. The conversation covers the historical challenges of hardware design, the current capabilities of AI tools, compressing the hardware iteration cycle, integration challenges, the limitations of AI, and enabling IoT innovation.

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