AT&T, KPN, Orange, and Swisscom have enabled roaming between their respective LTE for machines (LTE-M) networks, meaning that devices running on the operators’ low power wide area networks (LPWANs) are able to transition onto other networks in Europe and North America.

France-based Orange was particularly keen to trumpet the news, as its commitment to LTE-M is spread fairly broadly across its footprint. The operator has already launched the LPWAN service in France and Romania, and said Belgium, Slovakia, Spain, and Poland will follow this year.

KPN said it has already enabled LTE-M roaming with Orange Belgium, adding that “more roaming agreements will follow soon.” Carolien Nijhuis, Director IoT at KPN, said roaming with LTE-M “has been one of the most requested features by our customers in the market.”

Vodafone and AT&T have also previously agreed to introduce LTE-M roaming on each other’s networks by the end of 2019.

AT&T has deployed an LTE-M network across the U.S. and Mexico, while KPN has focused on the Netherlands, and Swisscom on its domestic market of Switzerland. The activation of roaming between different networks is regarded as an important step in the maturity of the LTE-M standard. The carriers said they expect to add additional supporting operators to this roaming arrangement to expand their cross-border capabilities in the coming months. According to the GSMA, LTE-M networks will fully cover Europe by end-2020.

LTE-M and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) are the two mobile IoT technologies that are promoted by the GSMA, and were standardized by 3GPP in the Release 13 specification. Other operators to have rolled out LTE-M include Telefónica, Telstra, and Verizon, while China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, KT, NOS, SFR, TDC, Telefónica, Telia, Vodafone and others have initially focused on NB-IoT.

Earlier in the year, the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) found that more than 100 operators worldwide had launched LPWAN based on one of the two standards. Furthermore, it said 20 operators in 19 countries had deployed or launched both NB-IoT and LTE-M networks – an indication of the growing acceptance of mobile operators that both technologies are required to support different IoT applications and devices.

While NB-IoT has proved to be the most popular technology to date — with 140 operators in 69 countries investing in NB-IoT compared to 60 operators in 35 countries for LTE-M, according to the GSA report — roaming arrangements appear more advanced with LTE-M. In 2018, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone completed Europe’s first international roaming trial using NB-IoT.

Orange, meanwhile, has favored LoRa as its second LPWAN option in France, eschewing NB-IoT. That is not the case in Belgium, where Orange Belgium is deploying both LTE-M and NB-IoT and is thus taking a somewhat different approach to the mothership.