This year LoRaWAN officially celebrated its 10-year anniversary, a testament to the long-range, wide-area capabilities of a technology which has established itself in applications such as smart cities and smart homes.
Alper Yegin, CEO of the LoRa Alliance, a non-profit association focused on driving the success of the LoRaWAN standard, said that the combination of long-range and low-power is a “winning combination” which is attributed to the success of the technology.
“No other communication technology is able to provide this combination, and we don’t stop at that,” said Yegin. “We also provide … this technology using [an] unlicensed band much like Wi-Fi does. That means anyone can buy equipment like a base station, and deploy it without having to rely on a public operator, or without having to rely on obtaining [a] special licence from the local regulatory bodies.”
This combination of long range and low power was a deliberate decision, “based on the needs of the market”. Today, Yegin said he saw the largest deployments using LoRaWAN being done by utility providers who need the scale and long lifetimes for the meters they deploy. Currently member company Netmore is working with Yorkshire Water to replace 1.3 million water meters across Yorkshire, UK, and will be using Netmore’s LoRaWAN network.
The growth of the market is healthy, said Yegin, with the aim to position LoRaWAN as the fourth pillar of connectivity: next to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular.
“Bluetooth has [been] established for connecting wearables, connecting audio equipment and also connecting smartphones … then Wi-Fi has been well established for providing wireless short-range broadband connectivity, again, connecting your laptop and phone but also cameras, audio systems and other security systems … for the past 10 years, we’ve been erecting the new pillar that is taking care of low power, wide area networking. That has been the missing pillar.”
Yegin was keen to mention a wide range of applications in which LoRaWAN has been deployed, to showcase the versatility of the technology in use cases where low power and wide area networking are required capabilities.
“Comcast, through their subsidiary MachineQ, their IoT arm, have deployed LoRaWAn in more than 10,000 Starbucks stores across the US,” said Yegin. “So today, if you walk into a Starbucks store in [the] US, there’s [a] more than 50% chance you are inside the LoRaWAN coverage.”
Another use case mentioned pivoted from coffee to pest control. Rentokil, one of the world’s largest pest control companies, joined the LoRa Alliance as a member company and used LoRaWAN because it could reach “the farthest corners of a building” to detect pests.
Where LoRaWAN suits and doesn’t suit
The topic of connectivity technologies is a tricky one, as it can incite discussions about which is the best and will win out over the others. But picking the right connectivity technology can be achieved through performing analysis on the requirements of an application and what technology suits best, preventing scenarios where a business deploys LoRaWAN, for example, and is frustrated about why it isn’t fulfilling their requirements.
If the issue is to do with range, and penetration, and power, then LoRaWAN suits. But there are, naturally, use cases where it doesn’t.
“It’s not like we can boil the ocean here,” stated Yegin. “The places that it [LoRaWAN] doesn’t fit are twofold: one, if you need to push [a] tremendous amount of data, like megabytes and gigabytes … that’s where you cannot use LoRaWAN, and the reason behind that is we’re suing an unlicensed band. The limitation of the unlicensed band is the amount of data you can transport.
“The second thing we cannot do is the so-called real-time communication. By that, what I mean is providing guaranteed millisecond-level latency. Applications like, say, controlling a drone or controlling a remote robotic surgery.”
Yegin provided an analogy of driving on a highway to how LoRaWAN operates and therefore doesn’t suit real-time communications: “You cannot commit your arrival time to your counterpart in seconds … you can tell them you’re going to be there, plus or minus 10 minutes, but you cannot tell them you’re going to be there at a precise time on the highway because it’s a shared medium.”
Therefore, because of this key difference, LoRaWAN services the massive IoT industry and not critical IoT.
Have there been circumstances where the Alliance have had to steer customers away from LoRaWAN, I asked Yegin. The answer, unequivocally, was yes.
“We run into that … and most of the time it’s just due to [a] lack of education or setting up wrong expectations,” he explained. “We’re still working on educating the market about what LoRaWAN is good for and how it works. So there’s this awareness gap we are working on closing.”
Positioning LoRaWAN as the fourth pillar
In referring to LoRaWAN as the positioned “fourth pillar” along with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular, the hope is also that it becomes as recognisable a technology to consumers as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, through interacting it with their daily lives.
For LoRaWAN, the expectation is that that will happen in the smart building, or the smart home.
“With smart buildings, people are going to get familiar with LoRaWAN because … you’ll be touching some device, or you’ll see some devices using LoRaWAN in your office, in your residential building,” said Yegin. “And then the adjacent mark of the smart building is [the] smart home, where we already have a handful of member companies with products, and we’re in touch with [the] CSA [on] Matter.”
Use cases where LoRaWAN is reaching “people and the planet” include for search and rescue teams, panic buttons, forest fire detection, and conservation and poaching detection.
The ambition is for LoRaWAN to become a utility, no different to water or energy.
“Wherever you need to power an electric device, what do you do? You look around, you see a power outlet, [and] you plug it in,” said Yegin. “Our vision is to make LoRaWAN ubiquitously available through multiple networks … whether it’s a private network at home or the city network.”
This vision relates the experience of looking for connectivity and not finding multiple networks, but just one LoRaWAN network, so consumers can have a “plug and play” experience when purchasing a device and getting it connected. Embedding LoRaWAN into electronics is part of this in making the technology ubiquitous.
Part of this plan is currently in motion for the Alliance, more specifically integrating private and public networks.
“For example, integrating networks. We have roaming hubs that integrate public networks with private ones and community ones … also in space,” said Yegin. “The integration [of] … adding new networks is in motion.”
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