Lower power wide area network (LPWAN) provider Actility has announced a deal with Here, the automotive-focused mapping platform that has major IoT ambitions. This will see Actility use Here’s Open Location Platform (OLP) to augment location services, which it offers as part of its ThingPark network platform.
Fellow LPWAN provider Sigfox is also a Here customer, as of June, and the two deals indicate Here has an opportunity to become a default platform for location-aware services on these wide area machine-to-machine networks, which target sectors like smart cities and public utilities.
This is a nice win for Here, which should also help flesh out the OLP. Currently, cars using Here’s mapping systems are the main source of data to refresh the OLP, so adding new devices to the system should improve its collective accuracy – a benefit not just for Here, but for all the users.
The plan is to integrate Here’s offering into a new service that will be launched soon for Actility customers, promising them a more cost-effective and energy efficient system for asset management in logistics and supply chain applications.
“Asset tracking is a strategic market for Actility, especially since our acquisition of Abeeway last year, which strengthened our solution portfolio with a LoRaWAN tracking device,” said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility (which uses the LoRa LPWAN technology to underpin its offerings).
“Today, we are very enthusiastic to join forces with Here to fill what we believe to be a gap in the market: multi-country, low power geolocation solutions with increased accuracy in almost every situation and a compelling business case based on low total cost of ownership.”
Actility is behind some 50 LoRa service providers, across 30 countries, providing both the back end software and services as well as the networking infrastructure that lets an operator or customer set up their own LoRa network. There are others in this game, namely Senet and Everynet, the latter with an interesting wholesaling and financing approach.
Abeeway was a French start-up that specialized in LoRa tracker devices. Actility, also French, decided to snap up the company, in order to offer a more packaged offering for those looking to use the unlicensed LPWAN (U-LPWAN) protocol in asset tracking applications.
Now augmenting the Abeeway trackers is Here’s indoor location system, which actively monitors WiFi access point information to estimate where a device is – sniffing the WiFi points to determine better where an object is located relatively.
Sigfox signed a similar deal with Here back in June, which is also geared towards logistics applications. Sigfox plans to use an embedded WiFi module to sniff out nearby networks, details of which it can then send back to base via the Sigfox protocol. The cloud-based networking applications can then use them to determine where a device actually is.
The U-LPWAN technologies, even in the best case scenario, are still nowhere near as accurate as a technology like GPS. However, they use far less power than the satellite systems, and will enjoy the benefits of a longer sleep time too. These logistics applications can’t make do with accuracies measured in hundreds or dozens of meters, and so adding a low cost and low power WiFi chip can dramatically improve these accuracies – without having to provision the device to join those WiFi networks.
Sigfox says that there are live use cases, including shipping, air transport, and luggage tracking. Until now, Sigfox-only location accuracy has not been great – typically measured in hundreds of meters. This is useful for many applications, where you might want to know if an asset has left a ringfenced area or a particular depot, but it is not good enough for more demanding applications.
Sigfox and Here cite a prediction from Cisco and DHL that the global supply chain and logistics sector could create some $1.9tn of economic value. Sigfox argues that current RTLS systems are not always viable due to the costs and battery life performance – although it isn’t providing pricing for the current service or expected hardware costs.
When pushed, the company said that ‘Sigfox-enabled’ devices start at $2, and that WiFi components cost between $2-3, which suggests a $5 ballpark for such a system. When asked about battery life, it said that this was highly dependent on the frequency of WiFi used, but that it will be “significantly lower than using GPS.” It added that there are confirmed customers, but that it can’t disclose their names yet.