Horn Trumpets Ingenu's Potential

Ingenu CEO John Horn is at ITEXPO and IoT Evolution Expo this week offering an update on the company’s progress in offering an alternative to cellular, LoRa, and SIGFOX IoT connectivity options.

The company, which has been in business since 2008, has 38 private networks on five continents running today. Now it is building out a nationwide U.S. network based on its own Random Phase Multiple Access technology and specifically targeting Internet of Things applications. With RPMA, one access point on a tower can cover up to 200 square miles, and endpoints have a battery life of 10 years. Horn yesterday said he expects to have Ingenu networks running 30 U.S. cities this year, with Dallas and Phoenix – where the company is now hanging equipment on towers – to come online first. Ingenu is also doing network construction in California.

Horn said Ingenu is also working hard at creating a global standard, an effort he added the company will talk more about at Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona.

Of course, SIGFOX is seen as a strong contender for IoT connectivity in Europe. But Horn said Ingenu has a number of advantages over SIGFOX, and added that although SIGFOX has been good at promoting its message, it isn’t a winning solution so he expects those who select it to defect and turn to Ingenu.

Ingenu, Horn said, has a true uplink, which SIGFOX does not. Ingenu, he added, also offers orders of magnitude more throughput and capacity than does SIGFOX. While Ingenu can support more than 200,000 devices per tower-based box, SIGFOX supports just 1,000 devices, added Landon Garner, Ingenu director of marketing.

“Just the capacity alone is a killer,” said Garner.

Horn said that of all of the IoT devices, 86 percent of machines use 3megs or less, so cellular will be used for the machines with data requirements that are higher than that, LoRa and SIGFOX will take the 1 percent at the bottom, and Ingenu will take the rest.

“We don’t want much, we just want 80 percent of the world,” he said.