Senet said it will offer a turnkey solution to communication service providers that want to deploy low power wide-area network services on their physical assets. The company said its portfolio of cloud-based managed network services includes security at the core as well as carrier-grade scalability, application onboarding, and provider branding options.
Purpose-built low power wide-area networks are competing for some of the same customers that might otherwise use cellular technology for internet of things deployments. Wireless carriers including Verizon Wireless and AT&T have launched cellular network solutions for the IoT, but several European and Asian operators have invested in dedicated low power wide-area networks like the one Senet is building in the United States. SoftBank, for example, has invested in narrowband IoT, which is part of the LTE standard, and also in LoRaWAN, the same open source technology used by Senet. Senet is hoping U.S. operators could take a similar approach.
“This type of deployment brings [a] total cost of ownership that is significantly lower than other options, particularly cellular,” said John Nye, Senet VP of business development, in a presentation at the Enterprise IoT Summit in Austin, Texas.
Nye said the Senet network is already available in 225 cities in over 23 states, and covers 50 million people in the U.S. He said that although Senet uses unlicensed spectrum, it is an FCC-certified provider of LPWAN services.
“We can move quite fast in terms of deploying,” Nye said. “We recently lit up a network in Florida in no more than about 3 days, and that’s from implementing the gateways into actually doing testing to validate that we could pick up the devices.”
Unlike narrowband IoT, LoRaWAN offers two-way communication. Nye said this makes it appropriate for use cases that require control in addition to monitoring. He added that LoRaWAN is more widely available at this time than NB-IoT.
“LoRaWAN is available today,” said Nye. “If you are actively looking to deploy IoT services and those services are appropriate for a low-power network, we can make that happen now.”
