18 Apr 2016

LoRa: Kickstarting IoT innovation in the UK

As interest in the Internet of Things grows Low Power Wide Area technologies are competing for the comms industry’s attention. One that’s widening user access is LoRa, explains Alun Lewis

While the cellular community is working on standards to provide the kinds of connectivity required by the IoT, such as LTE-M and NB-IoT, other unlicensed spectrum solutions have been appearing from multiple other directions.

The main current options in this field, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, supporting business models and promoter and user communities are known as Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies: SIGFOX, Weightless, Ingenu, nWave – and LoRa. The last, in particular, has cost and performance characteristics that are generating huge interest from an incredibly diverse community, ranging from local communities of geeks and engineering enthusiasts to some of the largest high-tech companies on the planet.

Meeting machines’ needs
Until very recently if you wanted to deploy M2M technology to monitor assets your choice was limited to using a mobile service provider for the connectivity element. You bought a SIM, put it in your device, bought a subscription and away you went.