Network infrastructure provider Huawei has announced eRAN13.1, which it claims is the first Release 14-based system for NB-IoT on the market. If it performance claims are true, this will provide a very big step forward for NB-IoT adopters, which are often hampered by their relative lack of LTE penetration, compared to their legacy 2G networks. Riot has long maintained that there’s a serious chicken-or-egg problem for LTE-M and NB-IoT, in that they are confined to the existing LTE network footprint. The claims of how easy it is to upgrade LTE infrastructure to support the new protocols are a moot point, if the network operator is not subsequently planning on expanding that footprint. As such, we have taken a dim view…