Smart Home Ecosystem

IoT Interoperability Requires Security

As Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives spin up around the globe, the race is on. And building from a foundation that isn’t going to require short-term retooling is critical for continued success of your effort.

Privacy and security have emerged as key requirements for IoT. The cost of not protecting data—both inside a closed environment and end-to-end through the Internet—is too high. Sensor networks such as those envisioned for IoT raise the specter of early-generation SCADA system build-outs, which taught us many lessons. Nobody wants a repeat build-out of early-generation, unprotected infrastructure controls.

The US government is paying close attention. For example, “Security Tenets for Life Critical Embedded Systems” is a draft document from the US Department of Homeland Security currently open for comments. The opening paragraphs include:

“Designing security into life critical embedded systems is increasingly important as more and more devices are becoming Internet connected smart things in the Internet of Things (IoT). . . . These devices have the potential to better mankind, but also the potential to be co-opted by malicious parties and do grave harm.”

Interoperability of IoT devices depends on widely accepted standards. Who’s putting out standards with security in the core?

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Operator Opportunities in Smart Cities

According to IHS the cumulative global volume of cellular M2M connections used in smart city applications will rise from about 18.6 million connections in 2014 to roughly 162.7 million connections by 2020, representing a 43.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over this period.

IHS forecasts that the annual revenue from cellular M2M connectivity services in the smart cities market will rise from $545.8 million globally in 2014 to $2.5 billion globally in 2020, at a CAGR of 29.0% over this period.

IHS forecasts that the annual revenue from cellular M2M-based, end-to-end services in the smart cities market will rise from $5.7 billion annually in 2014 to $25.4 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 28.4% over this period.

IHS recommends that operators partner to reduce their various risks in the smart cities market, utilize multiple connectivity technologies (especially low power wide area networking [LPWAN]) and not simply cellular, and broaden their view beyond M2M-type uses cases to account for the integration of other government and private databases and crowd-sourced social media feeds.

Turin’s smart city project adopts OneM2M and M-Bus

Hardly a month goes by without a new communications protocol staking its claim for a critical role in the IoT. These may be in the wide, local or personal area network, and each one usually, beneath the big vision statements, has quite particular strengths and target use cases.

This makes efforts like OneM2M important, as they seek to create cross-platform protocols to allow these many networks to interwork, and to protect early adopters from technology dead ends. This defines an abstraction layer between applications and the various network protocols and was created as a joint effort between a bewildering array of standards bodies and industry alliances. Its idea was to accelerate its development by reusing elements from its stakeholders’ existing standards, such as the Broadband Forum’s TR-069 specification and the Open Mobile Alliance’s network management definitions.

The ultimate aim is that regulators will endorse a OneM2M label to boost confidence by kitemarking interoperable products, rather like the WiFi Alliance certification program or even the CE Mark.

OneM2M was ratified as a standard by ETSI in January and real world projects are starting to emerge. SK Telecom in Korea has been the leader, deploying a prototype platform based on OneM2M specifications. But an interesting aspect of the IoT is that networks will often not be deployed by conventional carriers but by vertical market companies and integrators, and by cities.

The first smart city project to trial OneM2M is Turin, Italy, a program which is part of the European Union Almanac initiative, along with Copenhagen, Stockholm and others. Turin has adopted the software stack to allow developers to create valuable apps with standard web tools, and with no need to understand “Sigfox or LoRa or other networks”, as Roberto Gavazzi, program manager on the project for Telecom Italia, told EETimes. Several different networks will be in use in Turin to support its wide range of application trials, ranging from the usual lighting and parking apps, to bike sharing and robotics.

Turin and Telecom Italia are also implementing one of the latest protocols to target the IoT, and the smart city in particular, M-Bus, which was initially developed specifically for metering but which is addressing some additional use cases now. Turin will install 25,000 M-Bus systems in the 169 MHz band for a one-year pilot. It was chosen because it is low cost and low power and, unlike LTE-M, available now. It was also seen as being preferable to Sigfox and LoRa because it is a formal standard, ratified by the European Commission in 2005.

There is also a nationwide plan to use M-Bus to support gas meters, with a target of equipping 60% of those, or 12m units, by 2018. Other countries are also interested in M-Bus for metering, including France (which will implement it for gas and water units from next year, also in 169 MHz). Germany and the Netherlands are adopting the technology in the 868 MHz band according to Texas Instruments, one of the original developers of the spec.

Source: Rethink Research

How To Secure Your Private IoT Environment

RFID, IoT and AIDC News: The Internet of Things - It Won't be Easy

RFID, IoT and AIDC News: The Internet of Things - It Won't be Easy

Amazon Web Services launches Amazon IoT, a cloud service for Internet of Things data

Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon IoT, a new service companies can use to hook up with Internet-connected devices and build applications based on them.

Until this point, working with devices, networks, security, and data collection for Internet of Things (IoT) applications has been difficult, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels said at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas today.

A feature called Device Shadows will “make it easy for you to actually control your devices without having to have the specific knowledge of how to communicate with that device,” Vogels said.

Amazon IoT also comes with a device registry, a rules engine, and a publish-subscribe Device Gateway feature that supports the MQTT protocol, AWS executive Matt Wood said during a presentation on the new tool. There are newC and JavaScript software development kits and an Arduino library to help developers work with the service.

Not surprisingly, AWS is emphasizing how much Amazon IoT can be connected up with many other AWS services, including S3, DynamoDB, Amazon Machine Learning, and Lambda.

see more at 

Ranking the Internet of Things companies

When you think of smartphones, you automatically think of… Apple. When you think of social networks you automatically think of… Facebook. And when you think of Internet of Things companies?

According to our latest web-analytics ranking there is a head-to-head race going on between 5 companies: Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and IBM.
Iot Analytics measured which Internet of Things companies people search for on Google and talk about on Twitter, which firms make the newspaper and blog headlines, and how many IoT-focused employees these companies have.

More at ...

Public Consultation on draft BEREC Report on enabling Internet of Things

During its 24th plenary meeting (1-2 October 2015, Riga) BEREC approved for public consultation the draft Report on the Enabling the Internet of Things.
This document gives BEREC’s survey and assessment of the state of play on M2M services with the perspective of fostering an environment that will result in sustainable competition, interoperability of electronic communications services and consumer benefits. It is aimed at presenting the most common M2M characteristics and assessing whether M2M services might require special treatment with regard to current and potential future regulatory issues. Some suggestions by BEREC addressed to NRAs – where possible – are included on how to deal with them.
 

The public consultation on the draft document will run from 5 October until 6 November, 2015.

The Internet of Things is now the Smart Home.

In the last year or so, we’ve stopped saying “the Internet of Things” and moved on to say “smart home” when referring to all those connected products we keep hearing about. It sounds like a similar catch-all phrase that encompasses everything from Bluetooth light bulbs to your Sonos audio system. Except it’s not. None of us live in a smart home, regardless of how many of those gadgets you already own. No, we’re a long way from that. We’re only barely living in a connected home, a netherworld somewhere between the IoT and the super cool smart home of the future.

Don’t be fooled though. This is an old-school rebranding exercise to obfuscate the fact we’re no closer to having a smart home than we were 12 months ago.

What’s the difference?

At the Smart Home Summit in London, which took place between September 29 and 30, both the connected home and the smart home were discussed at length. We can forget about the Internet of Things; that’s old news. What we’ve got now is the connected home, and that’s code for a whole mess of stuff that doesn’t work together, is confusing and expensive to buy, and is found in a market so dense that Googling the term “smart home” is enough to put even the most enthusiastic geek off.

To make our homes (and lives) smart, they all need to talk and interact with each other, seamlessly.

What’s the difference between a smart home and a connected home? It’s actually quite simple. Existing connected products, from those in the home to in our car, don’t communicate with each other very well. To make our homes (and lives) smart, they all need to talk and interact with each other, seamlessly.

Here’s how it’ll work. At the moment, a connected thermostat learns your regular movements, so it makes sure the house is warm when you get home at six. But it’ll probably be freezing if you come home unexpectedly at 4. The smart home would have had a good conversation with your car to know you were headed home early, and that it’s because you’re not feeling well, then adjust everything accordingly — if you had a fever, you wouldn’t want a baking house. To get the same result in the connected home, actions are required on your part, and forget about any of it working if someone else is already home and has changed the settings already.

Luxury future living

If that degree of autonomy and intelligence hasn’t got you excited about the smart home, and its benefits over the connected home, how about this. Think of the future smart home as the residential equivalent of living in a luxury serviced hotel, where all of the stuff you don’t want to do — organizing the washing, doing the grocery shopping, optimizing the heating, and maintaining a security system — is done for you, leaving lots of time for doing cool stuff. Or, at least, more work so you can pay for it all.

Suddenly, the connected home looks a bit rubbish, and the Internet of Things a quaint old phrase that’ll soon be consigned to the tech history books. When’s the smart home coming? Hold on. First, there needs to be a shift away from the gadget-orientated connected home, to a smarter, more thoughtful way of living.

Read more..

As LTE defends itself against LPWA, convergence is on the cards

Ericsson has been announcing a string of contracts to support smart meter networks, the latest with Skagerak Nett, a utility in Norway. With 180,000 meters, such a deployment is small fry compared to the smartphone networks the Swedish vendor rolls out, but it has good reason to boast of its conquests with the energy providers. The move by many countries to initiate smart meter programs has been a significant catalyst for the LPWA (low power wide area) networks market, which is now becoming a hotbed of competition between different connectivity technologies. With specialized offerings like LoRa, Sigfox and Weightless all engaged in standards activity and heading towards licensed spectrum, Ericsson is on a mission to prove that cellular solutions – from GSM to the emerging LTE-MTC standards – remain the best choice for smart city applications.
These applications range from metering to lighting to traffic management, and many others. To qualify as true smart city projects, they need to be integrated into a common data platform (as in the pilot being run in Bristol, UK). In most cases, each application remains quite separate, but even where a city hasn’t progressed much beyond metering, there is still a spotlight on the element these services have in common – the need for a very low cost, very low power wireless network which can cover a whole city easily.

In the past, these long range machine-to-machine services were usually handled by GSM, where they existed at all, but as the range and criticality of such services grows, the ageing standard is seen as too limited in functionality and power efficiency to be a long term solution (though there is a body of opinion, and R&D, which contends that ‘GSM-Advanced’ would be a more suitable network for wide area M2M than LTE-MTC).

Specialized options have leapt to the challenge, and to the opportunity afforded by the future growth of smart cities and the wide area internet of things (IoT). Most of these have gained a quick route to market by implementing their networks in licence-exempt bands, primarily the ISM spectrum (915 MHz in the US, 868 MHz in Europe). The unlicensed airwaves mean their customers can deploy at low cost, although much of the early commercial business of firms like Semtech and Telensa has come from private networks, often in licensed bands, even while they push an ISM solution as the way to achieve significant scale and a broad ecosystem.

There are various technical approaches – Sigfox and Plextek’s Telensa are based on UltraNarrowBand (UNB) principles; Semtech (whose technology underpins the LoRa would-be standard) on DSSS (direct sequence spread spectrum) CDMA; Weightless uses DBPSK modulation; and another solution, from On-Ramp Wireless, is based on RPMA (random phase multiple access). All these come with pros and cons – CDMA-based schemes have higher overhead than pure UNB, for instance, but greater flexibility to avoid interference by moving between channels. But they all have key elements in common.

On one hand, to date, they have succeeded in keeping their power efficiency and range well ahead of the cellular alternatives, creating a dilemma for mobile operators which want to get into smart city services. Some are even harnessing these LPWA technologies, whether as a complement or stopgap to LTE remains to be seen (Bouygues and KPN are using LoRa, Telefonica invests in Sigfox).

On the other hand, while the LPWA technologies may have the headstart – M2M-optimized LTE-MTC will not be finalized for at least another year, and even then may not achieve the same efficiencies as its rivals – they will soon run out of steam if they cannot support mission-critical city apps such as public security and smart grid. This will require new spectrum options – as the ISM band becomes congested, it will remain a low cost option suited to applications that only need best effort performance, but cities and carriers will look to more reliable places to deploy their key services.

In Ericsson’s world, the answer is simply cellular – GSM, broadband LTE and LTE-MTC providing the full range of IoT functionality. But there is a logic to the idea that cellular and LPWA technologies should converge, to harness the advantages of both – the extreme efficiency and wide range of LPWA with the huge ecosystem and licensed spectrum of LTE.

An effort of this kind is already seen at Huawei since it acquired Neul, the chip designer which originally designed the Weightless technology. Weightless originally targeted the TV white spaces spectrum, but has just released its specifications for the ISM band, under the label  Weightless-N. In the meantime, however, its only silicon provider (and major IPR holder), seems to be at the heart of a Huawei initiative which could make the LPWA candidates redundant. Called Cellular IoT, the Chinese company refers to it as a ‘4.5G’ technology, which appears to harness Neul chips and some LPWA functions while running them in cellular bands, and with a convergence path to LTE-MTC.

Vodafone has come out in support of Cellular IoT, which is likely to be commercialized next year as well as becoming part of the 3GPP standards. An interesting outcome – considered quite possible by some stakeholders – is for this effort to converge with that of the LoRa Alliance, which is also seeking to push its technology into 3GPP Release 13 via a licensed-band implementation. This mainly targets operators’ existing GSM spectrum, in which some channels can be freed up as 2G services are turned off or reduced in capacity. Future options for licensed-band M2M may include dedicated frequencies in the guard bands within the 700 MHz LTE spectrum (an outcome being heavily backed by Qualcomm and some carriers ahead of the ITU World Radio Conference this year). With or without the dedicated channels, the 700 MHz ‘second digital dividend’ is expected to be heavily used for M2M applications in Europe, because of its strong propagation qualities – even better than ISM – and because much of the low frequency LTE broadband work has already been done, in the 800 MHz spectrum.

While LoRa is engaged with the 3GPP, the two main UNB proponents, Sigfox and Telensa (a spin-off from Plextek), are cooperating on specifications which they hope ETSI will adopt for a common LPWA platform, helping to broaden the ecosystem and improve the economics of their approach.

Meanwhile, Weightless claims that it already is a standard  – if one without a commercial deployer or obvious source of silicon at this stage. But it does offer its technology royalty-free to any company wanting to develop base stations or terminals and says the former carries a bill of materials of under $3,000, while a device can be made for $2.

William Webb, CEO of the Weightless SIG, said on the launch of Weightless-N: “Open standards are simply better for developers – they minimize cost, increase choice, mitigate risk, encourage innovation and are sustainable.”

Weightless-N is designed around a DBPSK (differential binary phase shift keying) modulation scheme, which transmits in narrow bands and mitigates interference by hopping between frequencies. Like LoRa, it also supports encryption of all transmissions. It also supports mobility with the network automatically routing terminal messages to the correct destination, even when multiple operators’  networks are present in the same place.

This intense activity among groups promising alternatives to cellular explains why Ericsson is so keen to talk up its successes in smart metering, the most important deployed application to date in the smart city. Recently it partnered with Telefonica O2 Germany and the E.ON Research Center at Aachen University to convince the world that LTE really was suitable to smart meter networks – and, implicitly, that LPWA alternatives would be a flash in the pan until secure, licensed-band LTE-MTC emerged.

Ericsson said its trials in Germany had shown that LTE base stations could support transmissions between meters and IT systems within the required time of 100ms, even with heavy traffic, because of LTE’s quality of service features. Fiona Williams, research director at Ericsson, said: “We were happy to see that the QoS features of LTE fully met the communication requirements for power network automation, which are far more stringent than other requirements specifications for smart meter measurement acquisition.”

The Swedish firm says LTE Release 13 will improve latency and power efficiency further and provide a path to 5G, in which the IoT will be a key focus.  “We see the trial results as confirmation that public LTE networks, such as Telefonica Germany’s, offer a reliable and cost effective communications option to utilities companies deploying smart meters,” said Sven Koltermann, head of energy sales at the operator.

However, there are other powerful players eyeing the smart energy and smart city opportunities, and the start-ups behind the specialized LPWA technologies need to get their support. While Sigfox and LoRa may be riding on the favors of MNOs for now, the cellcos will always have a natural tendency to use LTE because they drive that ecosystem.

But utilities, security operators, site owners and other companies in the complex smart city value chain may want a technology they can control themselves – hence UK infrastructure supplier Arqiva’s decision to deploy Sigfox, as well as winning part of the country’s smart metering roll-out contract, with specialized communications technology from Sensus (the rest will be supported on cellular connections by O2). That UK example shows the complexity of the current smart city situation, and the way it is being carved up between LPWA and cellular contenders. The LPWA firms need to get powerful infrastructure or M2M services companies behind them, with the weight to turn their systems into de facto standards – or alternatively, as LoRa’s and Sigfox’s 3GPP activity may imply, they could seek an integrated role within the emerging cellular standards, which would guarantee their innovations a place within ‘5G’.

Source: Rethinkresearch

Low Power networks hold the key to IoT

A Guide to Internet of Things Radio Protocols

We’ve reached a key moment in the Internet of Things (IoT). Established communications protocols are being hurriedly adapted to meet the new requirements thrown up by IoT applications, and less-known protocols are on the verge of being swallowed whole by emerging giants.

WiFi and Bluetooth are familiar faces in the consumer electronics market. With nearly every smartphone containing both protocols, they are integral parts of the majority of consumer’s lives in developed economies – and are becoming increasingly important for consumers in emerging markets too.

Much less well-known are the likes of Z-Wave and ZigBee; rival mesh networking protocols that have been quietly competing in the emerging smart home markets, as well as the industrial markets – more so the case for ZigBee.

However, these protocols that are ideally suited for smart homes thanks to their low power consumption, but arrived on the scene well-ahead of any substantial demand for the smart home as a product or service – as the hardware was simply too expensive to exist as mass-market products. We are now standing at the tipping point where the smart home and its dozens or hundreds of connected devices will quickly become a mainstream offering – and both ZigBee and Z-Wave are threatened by the emergence of a new rival.

Thread is a low-power mesh network that is being promoted by Nest, the smart thermostat company that Google acquired back in January 2014 for $3.2bn. Nest went on to buy Dropcam ($555m, June 2014), for its IP security and home monitoring cameras, and Revolv’s 7-radio home hub (undisclosed price, October 2014), to substantially flesh-out what is a solid foundation for a complete smart home package.

Likely to be offered as the Android smart home (Android Home, Android Wear, Android Auto, etc.), Google’s interest in this market makes a lot of sense given the success of Android. Leveraging that market penetration to bring a hardware platform to market is a sensible business plan by itself – but one that is massively improved when Google’s software and services are thrown into the mix too, tying more and more users more stickily into the Google ecosystem.

In conjunction with the Works With Nest program, which certifies products that will work within the current Nest product ecosystem, Thread provides a way to add connectivity to new products to ensure interoperability, using fairly common 802.15.4 physical hardware and the Thread software stack – which threatens to erode or snatch ZigBee deployments thanks to its shared MAC and PHY layers, as well as the support for native IPv6.

Source : Rethinkresearch

10 steps to building a smart city

1. Work out what problems need fixing 

Too many smart city visions concentrate on big data and the internet of things when there are more fundamental problems, says Tom Saunders, a senior researcher at Nesta. Take Jakarta and Beijing: “They are both currently exploring data dashboards and citywide sensing projects to address issues around traffic congestion, when what these cities really need are vastly improved public transport systems.


2. Find a leader 

For Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarape Institute, leaders should come from the public sector. “Some of the standout smart cities – Barcelona, Amsterdam, Malmo – exhibited dynamic leadership from their mayors as well as chief executives,” he says. “Crucially, they did not leave the evolution of the city to the market … In parts of Africa and Asia smart cities are almost purely private sector-driven. As a result, we are seeing elaborate hi-tech satellite cities gathering dust.” The Olympic rings light up the stadium during the Opening Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics Facebook Twitter Pinterest The London 2012 Olympics brought different sectors together. 

3. Develop a vision everyone can get behind 

The Olympics is a good example of a shared goal, which succeeded in bringing together communities, the public and private sectors, academia, volunteers and business. “Many smart city projects fail in communicating the vision, capturing the imagination of people so they can be bothered to participate,” says Priya Prakash, the founder of Design for Social Change. “There is a cultural dimension missing in the conversation.


4. Make a business case 

Networks of sensors need expensive infrastructure, and there’s currently little precedent around whether it’s the taxpayer or industry that foots the bill. A vision that adds economic, social and environmental value could be key to attracting investment from tech companies, universities and elsewhere. “The tech is probably the easiest bit to fix,” says Stuart Higgins, of Cisco UK & Ireland. “Who pays, who drives the changes, who should be involved – they are all bigger challenges.

 5. Share data and incentivise innovation 

Open data is critical to fostering an ecosystem for innovation, says Tomas Holderness, a chartered geographer and Smart research fellow. But the public sector, with its entrenched ideas around data protection, can be reluctant to share. Mara Balestrini, partner at Ideas for Change, says city councils should see it as “investment rather than expenditure: I’m sure it would cost them a lot more to solve public transport issues by themselves”. Without a strong business case, councils risk wasting money on internet of things Read more 

6. Design from the bottom up 

“We have learned from past technology failures that large projects are doomed but breaking down projects into bite-size pieces often works better,” says Yodit Stanton, founder and CEO of OpenSensor.io. Fujisawa, Japan, is an example of a city designed from the ground up. “It’s a disaster proof, self-sufficient town with self-cleaning homes that generates its own electricity,” says Cisco’s Higgins. “Even the streets are designed to reduce energy consumption – they follow the shape of a leaf to help natural airflow and reduce the need for AC.


7. Tread carefully 

“We are still in the early days of exploring the costs and benefits of these technologies for society and business and perhaps a more cautious approach is needed,” says George Roussos, a professor of pervasive computing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He warns of the complicated issues around privacy that need addressing.

 8. Get politicians on board 

Political leaders are important for communicating the need for new tech, and assuaging citizens’ concerns about safety and privacy. “It would be great to see politicians explain why they are spending our taxes on a smarter city,” says Stefan Schurig, director of climate and energy at the World Future Council. “Dare I say they might even be able to justify why spending more on tech, even during times of ever-decreasing budgets, would deliver greater benefits.

9. Educate citizens 

A smart city will be irrelevant to most of its inhabitants unless they can learn how to use new technology, says Adam Dennett, lecturer in smart cities at UCL. Very few people can pull live data from an API or set up a new sensor network to monitor air pollution – but until more can, smart cities risk being “little more than a marketing tool for big business”, he says. 

 10. Spread the word 

Nesta’s Saunders, author of Rethinking smart cities from the ground up, calls for all cities to share evidence so that no one has to start from scratch: “This could be something as simple as blogging about the experience … but cities could also form networks, to share the lessons from their IoT pilots.” There’s enormous opportunity for new projects to rethink “old paradigms of urban planning” and “leapfrog old tech”, says Muggah, of the Igarape Institute – but he’s alarmed by the separation between the collaboration going on in richer cities and that in the vast majority of cities and slums in Africa and Asia.

Source: The guardian

Secure Communications applied to Internet-of-Things (IoT)

Orange selects Semtech’s LoRa RF for low-power wide area networks in France’s smart cities

Orange selects Semtech’s LoRa RF for low-power wide area networks in France’s smart cities - M2M Now - News and expert opinions on the M2M industry, machine to machine magazine

Digital Agenda Scoreboard 2015: Strengthening the European Digital Econo...

Future City Glasgow: A Day In The Life

SIGFOX - WHAT WILL YOU CONNECT?

What is a Capillary Network in the IoT/M2M services?

A capillary network is a local network that uses short-range radio-access technologies to provide local connectivity to things and devices. By leveraging the key capabilities of cellular networks – ubiquity, integrated security, network management and advanced backhaul connectivity – capillary networks will become a key enabler of the Networked Society
Capillary networks use short-range radio to provide local connectivity connecting to the global communication infrastructure through a capillary gateway. Capillary networks are a smart way to connect the billions of things and devices that need connectivity, but some new functionality will be needed.....more info

Source:Ericsson

IoT Network Provider

Qowisio, A French company that provides a low bandwidth internet of things (IoT) network has announced to have raised €10 million to build its first public network to cover France, a network that is expected to have full coverage (1,500 to 1,800 antennas) end of December. 

The startup is however not a new player in the space as they have already built 18 private IoT networks for customers spread in 29 countries (Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East). Their networks are currently transmitting 4.6 million messages daily. 

The revenue of the startup is already expected to be in the €15 million range in 2015 after a cumulative revenue of €9 million in the previous years since its inception in 2009. 

“We have already deployed ten of thousands network antennas for our various customers,“ said Cyrille Le Floch, CEO of Qowisio. 

Qowisio is however not keen on unveiling the name of the customers, big companies in “the energy and the telecom“ sectors Le Floch said.

Qowisio is using Ultra Narrow Band technology which provides a low cost, low power, long range network. Working with large companies looking after comprehensive solutions, Qowisio has developed a technology that covers the full stack of IoT from sensors, to the network, to the cloud and the final application. 

Qowisio is part of a space that is heating up fast with LoRa and Sigfox technologies as competitors. But Qowisio is departing from the Sigfox pricing approach of a yearly fee per device. 

“Our competitors are focussing too much on the network in the value chain, and they are applying an old telco model offering a per device per year fee. At Qowisio we believe this old model is not going to work in the IoT world. For example, there will be many devices that will have a very short lifespan. One of our customer for example have GPS beacons which are used a single time for 2-3 days to monitor the transport of assets. A per year pricing clearly does not work here.“ 

It will be interesting to see how the competition is developing in this space and enabling a larger range of tracking applications. One year ago it looked like there was not much competition on the Sigfox market, now the Toulouse company is just one among others. 

Source:.gpsbusinessnews

More articles

• T-Mobile to Cover the Czech Republic with SIGFOX Network

• Sagemcom: “We Will Enable Location on LoRa IoT Networks“

• IoT Network Actility Gets $25M In Funding Round

• Samsung Adds SigFox Network to Artik IoT Modules

Smart City Concepts

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its 700,000 villages.” Though that may at one time have been true, it is no longer the case. With about 30 country dwellers moving lock, stock and barrel every minute from Indian villages to become city dwellers, not many villages will be left in India by end of this century.

Towards the end of the last decade, our planet achieved two remarkable feats. First, our human population crossed the seven billion mark and for the first time in history, 50 percent of the world’s population was living in urban areas. This is expected to accelerate to 60 percent before 2025, globally; with the Western, developed world reaching an 80 percent urbanization level during this time frame. Urbanization has become so important that it has elevated some cities, like Brussels, Seoul, Bogota, and many more, to be even more important than the countries themselves contributing to over 40 percent of the country’s GDP. Interestingly, the UK has already demonstrated its efforts in focusing on this Mega Trend of urbanization and city as growth hubs with the creation of a new ministry role called the “minister for cities.” This person is tasked with unlocking the economic potential of cities, thus giving them more empowerment and freedom to do so.

As we further congregate in cities, it has become more important to make cities not only green, but also efficient. As a result, we are now seeing some early examples of what I would describe as eco-friendly cities. There are several cities that are focusing on specific aspects that help it run efficiently, such as on their transport, energy and waste management. In example, implementation of smart grids is being pushed heavily for smart energy management. Major energy companies like GE are building and operating smart grids for cities such as Atlanta for a monthly fee through a cloud platform.

While smart energy is essential, it is not the only aspect of a Smart City. A more coherent view of what exactly a Smart City is was made by my team at Frost & Sullivan, who scanned through numerous Smart City projects and initiatives currently undertaken globally and found some key parallels among them. We identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen.

Source: Sarwant Singh - Forbes

Smart Cities need Intelligent Platforms to thrive, says new report from Beecham Research

Smart Cities need Intelligent Platforms to thrive, says new report from Beecham Research

Connectivity analytics: More valuable than application analytics? - M2M Now - News and expert opinions on the M2M industry, machine to machine magazine

Connectivity analytics: More valuable than application analytics? - M2M Now - News and expert opinions on the M2M industry, machine to machine magazine

Mobilizing Intelligent Transport Systems Report

The transport sector is one of the fastest growing verticals in the IoT and one in which operators can play a key role.

The Mobilizing Intelligent Transport Systems Report is an adapted version of theIntelligent Transport Systems for Mobile Report released in June 2015. This adapted report is more concise yet still provides an exhaustive and rigorous account of how IoT solutions can serve ITS.  In so doing, the report examines a number of case studies, helping readers to better understand the ITS landscape and how appropriate policy and regulation can aid the deployment of ITS solutions.

The report concludes that mobile network operators (MNOs) have a crucial a role to play in ITS.

Representative IoT Platform Vendors

Representative IoT Platform Vendors according to Gartner

1. AT&T
2. Axiros
3. Bosch Software Innovations
4. Candi
5. Eurotech
6. GE
7. HP
8. IBM
9. LogMeIn
10. MachineShop
11. Microsoft
12. Oracle
13. PTC
14. SAP
15. Solair
16. Telit

The first carrier grade Low Power Wide Area network (LPWAN) protocol is now available for sensor, base station and network server providers

The LoRaWAN R1.0 specification today attained Public Release status and is now available to download from the LoRa Alliance website. The LoRa Alliance and its members, amongst which include many industry leaders and Mobile Network Operators, see this as a major step towards international standardization in LPWAN, catalyzing network deployments and certified sensor manufacturing around the world. The Alliance members have collaborated, sharing knowledge and experience and intensively testing the LoRaWAN R1.0 specification to ensure readiness for the entire ecosystem. This will drive the global success of the LoRaWAN Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) and guarantee interoperability in one open carrier grade global network....more info