Hologram in Australia

I’m testing a R410M-based unit with a Hologram SIM in Australia.

The same unit and card tested fine in the US a few days ago, and connected to Verizon.

It’s currently set up with +UMNOPROF=4 and ‘hologram’ APN.
I get an ok signal, but no registration (+CREG: 0,2).

I’ve found in other comments that the CAT-M1 agreements with various operators may not be fully in place yet. Is Telstra on that list, and could that be why I can’t get this to connect?
…or did anyone else get online in AU on -M1 with Telstra and Hologram?

Hey @thehansson,

While we don’t officially have a roaming arrangement with Telstra for Cat-M1 we have seen several Novas and other Cat-M1 devices use that network.

Can you try setting +UMNOPROF to 0 and then attempting a connection. Also, you’ll want to make sure that your SIM is on a global plan and not a US only plan.

Cheers,
Maiky

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Thank you Maiky,

UMNOPROF=0 in combination with +COPS=1,2,“50501” seems to do the trick!

Thanks!

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Fantastic! Thanks for following up.

I wasn’t aware Hologram doesn’t have Roaming agreement for Cat-M1 with Telstra, I have some units there using U-Blox SARA-R410M-02B (same as Nova) I set the AT+UMNOPROF to Telstra (I forget the number) and they work.

PS: I was gonna say Hologram should probably add the technologies they support but I see they already list it on: Global IoT Coverage | Hologram but they do!

That said I think Hologram should provide on a per-carrier basis as it would be nice to know whether LTE is supported on the major carriers or just one small carrier in a given country. Also it may be good to show all possible technologies (include NB-IOT and CAT-M1 as well as LTE, 3G, 2G) but show the unsupported protocol as greyed out or something. Personally I assumed LTE was equivalent to CAT-M1 which was incorrect.

Very helpful information. Unfortunately AT+UMNOPROF returns an error. I’m using puTTY at 9600. Other commands work but AT+UMNOPROF? and AT+UMNOPROF=0 both return ERROR. Is this because I’m using the 3G version with SARA U201.
Cheers

Yes, that command only works on the R410.

Is there any plan for Hologram to support CAT-M1 / NB-IoT services in the near future?

The global Cat-M1/NB-IoT roaming scenario isn’t fully standardized yet, so there are few confirmed networks that we have access to. Some carriers are only allowing their own SIMs to use these networks, while other carriers are simply extending roaming to all devices in their network. Since this is all informal until the roaming agreements are worked out, we don’t have a good method of determining which Cat-M1/NB-IoT networks we have been granted access to in this way.
Hologram users have successfully connected to Cat-M1 networks in Australia, and you are free to try connecting to them. However, since this is unofficial, we cannot guarantee access now or in the future.

If you have any more questions about specific coverage issues feel free to email us at support@hologram.io