It is the first of a number of cloud services products that Semtech will offer to support IoT application development. Over the past year, the company trialled a free cloud-based geolocation service with hundreds of users. The LoRa Cloud geolocation service was in beta test this year with a limited number of partners. It has been designed to support flexibility in deployment options. Semtech is currently bringing early customers onboard, with general availability through a new LoRa Cloud services portal expected this summer.
Semtech will also be launching a new flexible modem-based hardware platform along with a Cloud-based device provisioning and management service, to simplify the full life cycle management of LoRa-based devices and accelerate both the development and deployment of secure fully-managed IoT solutions.
The company is also in the process of introducing basic code building blocks for developers. The first of these, LoRa Basics Station (LoRaWAN gateway firmware), was announced and simultaneously released on GitHub in January 2019. Further areas of focus will cover device firmware, firmware updates over the air (FUOTA) and network performance analytics. To improve access to these tools, Semtech will turn LoRa Community into an open developer ecosystem portal. This will host a suite of developer training, technical resources and community tools.
“Semtech’s new Cloud-based geolocation service, accessed by a Cloud API call, will simplify and democratise access to geolocation for all LoRaWAN-based devices,” said Richard Lansdowne, Senior Director of LoRa Cloud™ services within Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group. “This is the first of a new breed of fully supported commercial LoRa Cloud services from Semtech that we will be providing as part of our overall strategy to simplify the development of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, which leverage the unique low power, long range and flexible deployment benefits of our LoRa devices and wireless radio frequency technology. With a free usage tier to allow anyone to trial the service rapidly and easily, LoRa Cloud geolocation also offers a simple and cost effect consumption-based pricing model.”
“We were impressed with the ease of integration, the response times and the accuracy of the trial service,” said Domenico Arpaia, CEO at Orbiwise. “It took us less than a day to migrate to the new service and it was great to see that Semtech had made it faster and more accurate, delivering a true enterprise-grade experience, in line with our customers’ expectation. The flexibility to deploy the service to match the security and privacy requirements of our customers in different regions will allow us to include this service as part of our standard offering.”
LoRa Cloud Geolocation features include:
- Simple API accepting signal-strength, signal-to-noise ratio and time of arrival data from LoRaWAN-based gateways and returning an estimated location.
- Supports all LoRaWAN-based gateways, with or without accurate time of arrival data
- Compatible with all LoRaWAN-based devices on all LoRaWAN-based networks
- Options for including multiple packets (uplinks) in a single query for improved accuracy
- 100 per cent stateless with all required data included in the query
- No device identity required – the company claims that total device anonymity ensured
- Support for multiple antennae per gateway
- Public Cloud or on-premise deployment options
