Back in the day when BlackBerry (aka RIM) was at the cutting edge of mobile technology, Ryan Hickey was technical director for RF firmware and Fraser Gibbs was technical director for cellular development. Now Hickey and Gibbs are focused on building a nationwide, low-power wide area network in Canada.
Eleven-x, the company founded by Hickey, Gibbs and investor Dan Mathers, initially launched in December 2016 with deployments in the Southern Ontario region. Now the eleven-x network has now been deployed in 22 markets covering more than 60% of Canada’s population.
The Eleven-x network uses LoRaWAN technology, which offers bi-directional, low-power wireless connectivity using unlicensed spectrum. The LoRa protocol is based on chip technology developed by Semtech. IoT endpoints connect via the LoRa protocol to gateways, which often use cellular networks for backhaul.
The most recent expansion of the Eleven-x network includes deployments in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Oakville and Burlington.
“This network expansion by Eleven-x can serve as a catalyst for innovation across the country for both public and private sector organizations,” said Nigel Wallis, VP of IoT and industry research at IDC. “In IDC’s 2017 IT advisory panel, almost 70% of medium and large Canadian respondents indicated that they have or will introduce IoT solutions.”
LoRaWAN technology is a competitor to LTE Category M1 and narrowband IoT, two low-power cellular technologies that target IoT applications. Analysts say that although these different technologies can serve similar use cases, there is room for all of them for the foreseeable future.
“There’s a really wide gamut of requirements and capabilities and there’s no one technology that can span all of that in an ideal way,” said analyst Lee Ratliff of IHS Markit. “The IoT is always going to be a heterogeneous type of network.”
