The landscape of the contemporary IoT radio access technologies (RATs) is excessively diverse, especially when it comes to such a complex environment as Smart City. On the one hand, this diversity offers operators sufficient flexibility to select the most appropriate RAT for their target application. On the other, it becomes a severe limiting factor, as it leads to high level of uncertainty for the IoT device vendors, who need to decide, which technology to support in their hardware. In this paper, we consider the provisioning of the low-power wide area network (LPWAN) devices with multiple RATs. First, we briefly discuss the parameters of several potential radio technologies, and analyze the pros and cons of combining them in a single device. Next, we prototype a real-life device capable of communicating via two perspective LPWAN technologies, namely, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, and report the initial results of our performance evaluation. These results confirm the feasibility of instrumenting a dual-mode device as well as reveal several important aspects related to the development of multi-radio devices and their performance. In our view, due to their higher flexibility, reliability, and dependability, the devices such as the one developed can be beneficial for various Smart City applications, with smart energy grids and road traffic control being just two of many examples.
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