u-blox Acquires IoT Communication-as-a-Service Provider Thingstream

u-blox, a global provider of leading positioning and wireless communication technologies, today announced it has acquired Thingstream, an IoT Communication-as-a-Service provider. Thingstream provides a solution designed for global IoT connectivity the uses the standard MQTT protocol, and offers it “as-a-service” in order to provide predictable cost and on-demand scalability, the release stated. Message queuing telemetry transport, or MQTT, has become a widely used data transfer protocol in the IOT. It is designed for constrained environments characterized by low power and bandwidth requirements, and transmits messages from one device to one or many others via a broker. Thingstream’s MQTT Anywhere service reportedly offers data transfer across more than 600 telecom carriers in 190 countries using 2G, 3G, LTE, and LTE-M networks.