In the homeland event of the cellular industry, it was hardly surprising that the emerging NB-IoT standard for machine-to-machine networking was welcomed with loud fanfares at last month’s Mobile World Congress. In public at least, last year’s technical split between Ericsson and Huawei was behind the vendors, and everyone was lining up behind the 3GPP’s upcoming specifications, which will be part of Release 13. That provided some ammunition for the cellular purists who argue that NB-IoT will make the current crop of low power wide area (LPWA) technologies, such as LoRa and Sigfox, redundant. But if they had looked around at the amount of WiFi involved in many of the mobile broadband exhibits, they would have seen that, in the…