Ericsson seems to have caught up with Huawei’s claimed performance for LTE Cat-NB, the new name for the NB-IoT low power WAN standard. It has announced a 94-kilometer connection in Australia on Telstra’s network, improving from 40km. It wasn’t long ago that Huawei announced a twofold increase in the coverage of its own Cat-NB cell sites. The Telstra-Ericsson announcement talks up the advantage that this gives for rural deployments. However, this only holds true if there is already an LTE network in place on which Cat-NB can be overlaid. However, many people will be painfully familiar with the state of rural LTE coverage, and given the low value of many of these machine-to-machine applications, there is limited incentive to roll out a…