[HH] IOT and LoRaWAN™ (Long Range wide-area networks)

[Stephen Ronan]

Anyone here have familiarity with LoRaWAN? Know of any budding related
activities/planned deployments in this area? I'd be curious to learn
more... Below is from an IBM press release last year:

"For years, the enormous potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) for
business  — to collect data from scores of devices, analyze and act
upon it to make quick and accurate decisions — has been held back by
technical challenges such as limited battery life, short communication
distances, high costs and a lack of standards.
"The technology, called LoRaWAN™ (Long Range wide-area networks),
overcomes these hurdles. Based on a new specification and protocol for
low-power, wide-area networks that taps an unlicensed wireless
spectrum, the technology can connect sensors over long distances,
while offering optimal battery life and requiring minimal
infrastructure. This allows it to deliver such benefits as improved
mobility, security, bi-directionality, and localization/positioning,
as well as lower costs.

"In support of LPWAN technology, IBM, Semtech, and other companies
also announced the LoRa™ Alliance, a new association to support and
develop and standardization LoRaWAN.

"The LoRa Alliance aims to combine hardware and software based on the
LoRaWAN standard for telecom operators and network operators, enabling
them to offer IoT services to both businesses and consumers. From
sensors and machines to monitors and wearables, soon connecting
billions of devices together could be as seamless as sending an SMS to
your local telecom provider.

"LoRaWAN sensors can communicate over distances of more than 100 km
(62 miles) in favorable environments, 15 km (9 miles) in typical
semi-rural environments and more than 2 km (1.2 miles) in dense urban
environments at data rates from 300 bit/s up to 100 kbit/s. This makes
them well suited for sending small amounts of data, such as GPS
coordinates and climate readings, where broadband can’t reach. The
sensors also require very little energy to operate; most can run for
10 years or more on a single AA battery and AES128 keys make
communication tampering and eavesdropping virtually impossible...

"IBM has also made the LoRaWAN protocol open source (Eclipse Public
License) for end-node development known as “LoRaWAN in C”.