How Semtech, Actility will Drive Adoption of LoRaWAN for IoT

Semtech, a global supplier of analog, and mixed-signal semiconductors, has announced that Actility, a low power wide area network (LPWAN) solution provider, has been selected for LoRaWAN deployment by three IoT network operators, including French postal service La Poste, marine electronics leader NKE Electronics and telecom operator Swisscom.

The Actility ThingPark solution uses Semtech’s LoRaWAN technology, which is now being standardized by the LoRaTM Alliance, and is a complete solution for large-scale LPWAN deployments.

The LoRa Alliance is a fast-growing IoT alliance with members focused on collaboratively driving the LoRaWAN protocol’s global success by sharing knowledge and experience to ensure interoperability among all telecom operators and private networks deploying the technology.

The LoRaWAN protocol offers many benefits over competing technologies, such as bi-directionality, security, mobility for asset tracking and accurate localization.

“Time-to-market is critical for operators that want to capture the IoT opportunity. We have taken a holistic approach with a platform that addresses not only core network management, but also customer enrollment, activation and billing and facilitates purchasing of third party value-added services. We can enable commercial LPWA networks in less than a month,“ said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility and secretary of the technical working group of the LoRa Alliance.

“Actility has been a key contributor to the LoRaWAN specification and a sponsor member of the LoRa Alliance,” said Hardy Schmidbauer, Director of Wireless Products and IoT at Semtech. “The Actility solution is a proven solution ready for large-scale network deployments now.”

“La Poste is engaged on a strategy to develop new services leveraging its brand and its strong customer interaction network. We believe that building a LoRaWAN-based network for the Internet of Things could be a key element in this strategy and that Actility could be a key solution provider to help us build this network and launch innovative IoT-based services,” said Rémi Karcher, Project Director at La Poste.

For Jean-Claude Le Bleis, CEO of NKE Electronics and a key ThingPark Wireless partner, “LoRaWAN is an ideal wireless protocol for industrial and smart building sensors. The dynamic data rate provides the flexibility to run high resolution sensing applications with private networks, or lower resolution monitoring applications, with the same products. We have products ramping to production for temperature, humidity monitoring, and metering with energy harvesting sensors.”

Actility also announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona its technology partnership with Swisscom around LoRaWAN-based networks.

“We foresee a significant increase in demand for low power wide area network-based solutions in the market,” said Gerhard Schedler, Head of M2M at Swisscom. “We feel that Actility serves as an important ecosystem and technology partner as we explore new opportunities to meet the diverse and emerging needs of our customers.”

Following the announcement of the LoRa Alliance, Semtech and Actility have seen a significant increase in available applications and sensors with the LoRaWAN protocol across all key IoT markets with clear focus on smart energy, smart city and smart building applications.