Company leaders include former Verizon CEO, CTO and former Qualcomm CTO
A company dedicated to connecting machines, Ingenu, announced this week the rollout of an “Internet of Things” exclusive network in 30 U.S. metropolitan areas.
The company said once the network is operational, it will cover 100,000 square miles and connect 100 million domestic users.
Ingenu, formerly Onramp Wireless, has an impressive roster of leaders including former Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg as a board member and adviser, as is former Qualcomm CTO Andrew Viterbi. Former Verizon CTO Richard Lynch is chairman of the Ingenu board, and former Raco Wireless CEO John Horn is the Ingenu CEO.
The initial network rollout is scheduled for Phoenix and Dallas/Forth Worth metro areas. Ingenu uses proprietary random phase multiple access technology, which is billed as reliable, cost-effective machine connectivity. Ingenu’s so-called Machine Network is slated to expand to 600 sites across the country in 2016. “This will ultimately provide ubiquitous machine coverage to millions of end-point devices in rural and metropolitan locations with two-way communication capabilities over 99.9% reliability,” the company said.
“The metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Dallas/Fort Worth were selected for the initial deployments due to the prevalence of current IoT applications operating in those locales, such as transportation, utilities, industrial monitoring, security and public infrastructure,” said Tom Gregor, Ingenu’s president and GM of public networks. “The Machine Network provides an ideal alternative to devices and applications that are currently connected via 2G cellular networks, which will be refarmed in the coming months to make way for higher bandwidth cellular technologies, which are not ideally designed for [machine to machine]/IoT connectivity.”
“Ingenu’s RPMA network is ready for virtually any IoT/M2M application and we anticipate that developers and technology partners alike will take advantage of all the benefits that the technology offers, such as unprecedented coverage, greater capacity and system longevity,” said Horn.
Ingenu’s network strategy has been likened to what Sigfox is doing in Europe. In May, for example, mobile T-Mobile along with Blue Cell Network and Sigfox conducted a three-month pilot project that will build out an IoT network in Prague.
The wireless deployment used Sigfox’s ultra-narrow band connection technology, which is touted as providing scalable, long-range, two-way connectivity between devices. Hardware installed on T-Mobile cell towers are designed to push data for IoT and machine-to-machine purposes.
Sigfox’s narrow-band IoT networks are a current focus of the broader telecom industry.
Use of narrow-band spectrum allows for deployment in licensed spectrum including in-band, guard band and standalone deployments. NB-IoT allows for robust coverage even in hard-to-reach spaces and is ideal for supporting lots of low-throughput, low-power devices.
Industry stakeholders, led by Vodafone, plan on dissecting the when, where, why and how of NB-IoT. Companies included in the NB-IoT Forum are China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Etisalat, GSMA, GTI, Huawei, Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone.
