Last week at IoT Evolution Expo new On-Ramp Wireless CEO John Horn sang the praises of low-power wide area network technology. This afternoon Hardy Schmidbauer told me why he thinks Semtech’s version of LPWAN is better.
Semtech is a mid-sized semiconductor company that invented LoRa, a low-power WAN architecture. It then formed the LoRa Alliance along with other vendors like Cisco (News - Alert) and IBM, as well as some service providers, to standardize it. The company is now in the process of licensing the technology to other semiconductor suppliers; alliance member Microchip is already a second source.
According to Schmidbauer, devices using LoRa networks have multiyear battery life and the cost of LoRa cellular modules are three to five times cheaper than those required by the technology On-Ramp Wireless owns and uses. Additionally, the prospect for interference with LoRaWAN, which operates in the sub-gigahertz range, is much lower than it is for On-Ramp Wireless, which operates at 2.4 gHz, says Schmidbauer.
LoRa also has significant reach, he said, and is already selling at extremely high volumes compared to On-Ramp and other alternatives like Sigfox—making it the most deployed LPWAN technology solution out there today.
The alliance was announced early this year at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert), and already has 100 members, and expects to double that by the end of this year. And the company is working with 50 MNOs worldwide, and has made a handful of public announcements of customers—with Bouygues of France, FastNet of South Africa, KPN, Lace in Russia, Proximus/Belgacom (News - Alert), and Swisscom, among others.
Whatever the LPWAN solution service providers elect to go with, the argument of companies like On-Ramp and Semtech is that this basic approach is a good and more affordable match for IoT deployments.