All current wireless standards are made for yesterday’s technology, and one group is saying it’s time to bring wireless communications up to the speed of the rapidly accelerating IoT.
The SIG Marketing Working Group (MWG) announced that it has made available its open source Weightless-N standard. It was designed to be a low cost, low power, long range IoT connectivity solution using UNB tech in ISM spectrum. The standard has been published, hardware to support it is here and real world deployments are already in the works.
Low Power, Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) like Weightless-N and Sigfox are becoming critical to the propagation of the IoT. MWG said the two standards are very similar in terms of what they do, how they do it and how well. The major differentiator is that Weightless-N is the only LPWAN open standard. This open standard allows developers to build with less risk, ongoing innovation, greater competition and lower costs.
“The only successful wireless tech has always been open standard,” said Professor William Webb, CEO, Weightless SIG. “You have to have open standards or you’ll never get everyone onto one proprietary technology. You have to have a certain degree of interoperability.”
Weightless-N operates in sub-GHz spectrum using ultra narrow band (UNB) technology to offer better signal propagation, a range of several kilometers even in challenging urban environments, very low power consumption and battery life measured in years.
Now, any company will be able to develop low cost base stations and terminals, royalty free, on networks owned and operated independently by those companies. And for a nominal cost. A Weightless terminal device can be produced for less than $2 with a base station for less than $3000.
“What we’ve come up with is pretty good, and we’ve left it open,” he said. “It is custom designed for the IoT, and only for the IoT. It’s utterly useless for anything else.”
Maybe the time has come to open the doors and let the IoT light inside.