As 2018 wound to a close, Qualcomm unveiled the MDM9205, a modem chipset centered around an ARM Cortex A7 processor, which supports LTE Cat-M1, Cat-NB2, and 2G/E-GPRS. With satellite support too, and Qualcomm’s Trusted Execution Environment, this looks like a pretty sophisticated bit of kit. However, this market is still in a race to the bottom, and Qualcomm is not known for being the cheapest. The low-power LTE variants provide noticeably more bandwidth than their U-LPWAN counterparts, LoRa and Sigfox. Because of this, the MDM9205 will be targeted at higher value applications, such as wearables, asset tracking, and (relatively) high bandwidth environmental sensing, where the higher power draw is tolerated in exchange for the improved throughput. The new chipset is…