Key Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) solution vendors including Actility, Cisco, IBM and a group of telecom operators comprising Bouygues Telecom, KPN, SingTel, Proximus, Swisscom have joined hands to form an IoT/M2M alliance - LoRa™ Alliance. The alliance is formed to be an independent, non-profit entity to create low-power wireless area network(WAN) standards to expedite the delivery of global IoT mobility for a variety of M2M, smart city, sensor network and industrial automation applications.
The Alliance aims to drive the global success of the LoRa™ protocol (LoRaWAN™) by sharing knowledge and experience to ensure interoperability between telecom operators. According to the Alliance, its technology enables public or multi-tenant networks to connect multiple applications into the same network infrastructure. This will facilitate device manufacturers and developers who are proposing solutions at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with longer battery lifetime that often do not need a powerful cellular connection.
Erik Hoving, CTO of KPN
Standardizing the communication to allow interoperability between large scale low power wide area network (LPWAN) deployments is essential to unlock the volumes for IoT.
Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility
With LoRaWAN, entire cities or countries can be covered with a few base stations, no longer requiring the upfront rollout and maintenance of thousands of nodes as in traditional mesh networking. This has made IoT possible now, with minimal infrastructure investment.
Dr. Thorsten Kramp, Master Inventor, IBM Research
To encourage the mass adoption of low cost, long range machine-to-machine connectivity, open ecosystems are critical. In addition to IBM's support of the LoRa Alliance, we have also released the IBM ‘LoRaWAN in C’ as open source under the Eclipse Public License, which provides a solid foundation for the development of a broad range of end devices compliant with the LoRaWAN specifications.
Richard Viel, Chief Operating Officer of Bouygues Telecom
The LoRa technology is ideal to target battery operated sensors and low power applications, as a complement to M2M cellular connectivity. The LoRa Alliance is an essential step to ensure interoperability and, therefore, mobility across Europe for our customers.
