LoRa Alliance All Members Meeting Recap

The Enterprise Internet of Things (EIoT) has become a massive network of connected devices and sensors that continues to take shape as new technologies bring connectivity to unprecedented applications. However, to reach its full potential an infrastructure must be in place that will enable the longest reach at the lowest power for a wide variety of sensor applications in IoT. LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) solutions are emerging to specifically address these IoT applications. LPWAN is a blanket term for an ecosystem of technologies that can provide wireless connectivity to ultra low-power devices in networks that can blanket everything from large facilities to entire cities. Many companies, protocols, and technologies exist in this space and are vying to standardize, but in our opinion the most promising and flexible is LoRaWAN. The LoRa Alliance, the largest and most powerful consolidated effort by industry leaders, aims to standardize LPWAN worldwide via LoRa technology.

Last week Laird attended LoRa Alliance’s 5th All Members Meeting and Open House from July 19th – 21st in Munich, Germany. The LoRa Alliance has grown rapidly from 31 members in March 2015 to nearly 370 members today, including companies like Cisco, IBM, Honeywell, HP, Flextronics, and ARM. In addition, a number of network carriers such as Orange, Swisscom, and SK Telecom are onboard with the Alliance as well as global test houses like TUV, 7 Layers, and AT4 Wireless, which has enabled global coverage with live networks operating in more than 120 cities in the world. With involvement from so many reputable organizations, it is clear that the LoRa Alliance is a major and significantly growing force in driving LoRa adoption.

Laird is an active member in the Alliance and joined hundreds of members from around the world to meet and showcase their LoRa solutions. Laird participated in the exhibition area which was very well attended and fostered excellent discussions and featured demonstrations and end-to-end solutions. Laird presented a demonstration using the RM1xx, the industry’s only combined Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRa module solution, and a BL600 BLE module.

In the demonstration, a BL600 development kit (BLE peripheral mode) used Laird’s smartBASIC programming language to simply and easily take temperature sensor data, send it over BLE to a RM186 (BLE central mode), which bridged this data over 868MHz LoRa connection to a LoRa Gateway, then onto an IP network and represented the data in a webserver.

For more information on LoRa check out our overview, Understanding LoRa.

Learn more about the RM1xx, here.