British satellite communications provider Inmarsat has joined the LoRa Alliance, one of the groups vying to lead the LPWAN (low power wide area network) space, which is expecting significant growth on the back of smart city and other IoT deployments. Inmarsat is the first satellite business to join the Alliance and this will enable LoRa developers to add satellite datalinks to their hubs and services in order to meet the more challenging network connectivity requirements.
For Inmarsat, this is an extension of its Internet of Everywhere campaign, which it launched back in September. The IoE strategy and product campaign aims to provide global M2M and IoT connectivity via its satellites, as well as broadband for the more traditional customer bases in maritime and aviation industries.
“Joining the LoRa Alliance is a natural fit for Inmarsat,” said Greg Ewert, president of the company’s enterprise division. “Our portfolio of M2M services, powered by our global network, have long been used to extend the reach of our customers’ M2M networks in a number of vertical markets, powering the Internet of Everywhere for solutions worldwide. We hope that our expertise will be a valuable addition to the LoRa Alliance, and we are pleased to champion a global standard for IoT connectivity.”
Currently, Inmarsat provides two flavors of satellite link as part of the IoE project. Its BGAN M2M platform provides two-way IP data to fixed and mobile assets, providing up to 448Kbps bandwidth to remote devices, with a latency of 800ms, 99.9% availability and an operational lifespan that will extend well into the 2020s.
As well as BGAN, Inmarsat also provides the IsatData Pro platform, a low-data rate service for asset tracking and telemetry. This supports burst-mode communication as well as a gateway for storing messages until they can be sent. With a web dashboard for device management and settings, the service claims that same 99.9% availability and can send 6,400 bytes and receive 10,000 bytes with a latency of 15-60 seconds depending, of course, on the size of the message.
Satellite doesn’t have the indoor or underground penetration that cellular and some LPWAN protocols do, but it offers a strong connection wherever it has a direct line-of-sight to the sky, and its vast coverage area can provide backhaul for wireless access points out of reach of wireline or radio links.
LPWAN technology still needs IP backhaul to connect it to the cloud platforms. In dense urban environments, a developer could use cellular, Ethernet, WiFi, or even a direct line into a fiber network to achieve this connection, but finding a reliable connection in other environments can be challenging. For instance, business installations in rural locations are unlikely to find an affordable fixed line connection, and could simultaneously have difficulty sourcing a reliable GSM-based connection – despite what operators’ coverage promises may indicate.
So for those sorts of remote deployments, satellite technology is very well suited to provide the IP-backhaul needed to plug the end devices into the cloud platforms that turn the data they generate into a valuable commodity. Some LPWAN adopters are going to find satellite connectivity very useful as the primary means of backhaul, and many are going to embrace it as a back-up.
The LoRa technology is also making strong progress with some of its early MNO adopters. In France, it is being rolled out by two operators, Orange and Bouygues. Orange, which is also trialling or deploying enhanced GSM and NB-IoT cellular solutions to expand its M2M activities, is building out LoRa networks in 17 French cities, with plans to go nationwide in time. In an interview with LightReading, the marketing director of Orange Business Services, Olivier Ondet, said LPWAN technologies would be the “big rupture” that will help the company achieve its target of generating €600m ($655m) in revenues from IoT services by 2018.
With such near term goals, carriers cannot afford to wait for the emerging LTE Release 13 standard for the LPWAN use cases, NB-IoT, which will not be fully commercialized until next year. Whether they use unlicensed spectrum technologies like LoRa as a stopgap solution en route to NB-IoT, or as a complement (in the same way as they use WiFi alongside 4G), they are providing significant momentum for a class of technology which has, before the excitement about the wireless IoT, been confined to private networks.
“With technologies like LoRa we can divide by 15 the quantity of energy you need to carry small information to do with parking meters, whether a door is open or closed, whether there is a water leak,” said Ondet.
Also in France, Bouygues Telecom last week launched a dedicated IoT subsidiary called Objenious. This will offer various services, some enabled by the company’s LoRa network, which currently reaches 15 of France’s largest cities and aims to cover the whole country by year end. Other key enablers are a data management platform from HP Enterprise and security solutions from Atos. B2B and B2C services will include connectivity and secure data center storage, data collection and network visualization. Third parties and start-ups are being encouraged to join the ecosystem, with Finsecure and energy management specialist Energisme among the first to sign up.
Of course, if Orange’s talks to acquire Bouygues lead to a deal, the two operators will have the world’s largest LoRa business, though counterparts elsewhere are also ramping up their activities after the low key trials of 2015. Dutch telco KPN has announced that its plans for a national LoRa network have been moved up a gear, and it is promising to complete the network in the first half of 2016, rather than by the end of the year as initially planned.
Working with Actility – a company that offers a range of smart city and smart factory solutions, including energy management systems for utilities – KPN has so far covered Rotterdam and The Hague. It reports that demand for LoRa in the Netherlands has been bigger than initially expected, and so poles in the rest of the country will be equipped with the antennas in the “very short term”.
For KPN, the addition of these LoRa base stations should be a fairly simple process, as it will use existing cell site locations. Once the access points are in place, Actility’s expertise in cloud management and IoT services kicks in. In addition to KPN, it also has LoRa-based deals with Swisscom, marine electronics specialist NKE Electronics, France’s postal service La Poste, and a trial with Finnish broadcast network operator Digita. Its ThingPark platform encompasses connectivity from the base station to the oneM2M-based cloud services that manage the links.
Actility also provides the ThingPark IoT Enabler Program – which consists of cloud big data storage, a cloud application development interface for prospective adopters, as well as the ThingPark Store and Cocoon – a software development environment for gateway developers looking to connect devices and sensors to a ThingPark gateway. This caters for WiFi, ZigBee, Modbus, KNX, MBus, and 6LoWPAN.