Huawei has announced eRAN13.1, which it claims to offer the first NB-IoT system that supports 3GPP Release 14 standards, enabling significant leaps in performance. The Chinese vendor is claiming a sevenfold improvement in peak uplink speeds and single-user downlink, reaching 157kbps and 102kbps respectively. Both cell capacity and cell coverage have doubled, it says, with the network now supporting 80,000 devices per cell. Huawei says its proprietary uplink channel estimation technology is responsible for improving the cell range, which is critical to the economics of a network that needs to achieve low cost and power, yet support some applications, such as smart agriculture, which must support near-universal coverage. Since most operators’ LTE networks have far lower penetration than their 2G…