Actility CEO calls LoRa the LPWAN tech of choice for industrial IoT
Low power wide area network (LPWAN) provider Actility has announced a deal with local network provider IoTCAN to deploy a nationwide network in Canada, beginning in Toronto, to support the internet of things (IoT). Actility is bringing its ThingPark platform, and will work with IoTCAN to deploy an estimated 300 sites this year with a focus on Toronto and industrial areas in major cities in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia.
Earlier this year Actility announced a $75 million Series D funding round to expand its vertical focus with an emphasis on areas including logistics, supply chain, smart buildings, energy and utilities. In terms of expansion, in China Actility partnered with manufacturer Foxconn to offer and end-to-end IoT solution portfolio. The company is also working with partners to deploy nationwide networks in Sweden, Latvia and Estonia.
Actility and IoTCAN are working to stand up a carrier-grade nationwide network and solution set. Ossama Bessada, IoTCAN co-CEO, mentioned applications for smart cities and device tracking. Actility CEO Mike Mulica said ThingPark is “the platform of choice…And with this announcement following closely on from the LoRa Alliance All-Members Meeting hosted in Philadelphia this week, it’s clear that LoRaWAN is now taking off in North America on a large scale as the best communication solution for industrial IoT applications.”
LoRa (long-range) is a LPWAN communication protocol and architecture that determines battery life of a node, network capacity, quality-of-service, security and other applications. It uses a star architecture, with a central node to which all other nodes are connected and gateways serve as the transparent bridge relaying messages between end-devices and a central network server in the backend. Gateways are connected to the network server via standard IP connections while end-devices use single-hop wireless communication to one or many gateways. All end-point communication is bi-directional, and supports multicast, enabling software upgrades over the air.
