The MIOTY Alliance, the industrial IoT group, formed in early 2020 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) to shepherd its burgeoning MIOTY technology into the crowded low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT space, has struck a deal with FábricaDigital in Mexico, described as a collaborative platform to help local firms with their digital transformation. FábricaDigital represents 500 enterprises in Mexico, and is engaged by the likes of Google, Honeywell, Continental, and Safran Group. The alliance said it is “already planning the implementation” of MIOTY solutions for the country’s industrial sector.
The FábricaDigital project is funded by Google and coordinated by the Ministry of Economy of Mexico. The relationship seeks to establish a new MIOTY hub in Mexico to develop MIOTY-based networks, products, services, and applications across the country’s “strategic sectors”. Alliance members from Fraunhofer IIS, as well as from engineering group LZE, a Fraunhofer joint initiative with the Friedrich Alexander University to commercialise research projects, and Swiss IoT company LORIOT, met with with the Mexican divisions of Google, Honeywell, Continental, and Safran Group, plus the Universidad Panamericana and Universidad Técnologica de Queretaro.
A statement said: “These meetings offered our members the opportunity to showcase the emerging 915 MHz product portfolio from partners such as IFM, Lansen, Ragsol, Sentinum, Weptech, and Wittra… The hardware and software solutions provided by our partners form the foundation for upcoming projects in industrial IoT, smart cities, and smart buildings in Mexico, as well as other countries throughout Latin America and the US.”
MIOTY (a portmanteau of MY IOT; stylised as ‘mioty’) emerged in 2018/19 as the go-to-market brand for the ETSI-defined telegram-splitting ultra-narrowband (TS-UNB) specification, co-developed by the Fraunhofer IIS in Germany, and initially promoted by Canadian firm BehrTech. It was designed to replace the Wireless Meter Bus (M-Bus) standard that has underpinned smart metering in Europe, plus certain markets in Asia and Latin America.
Founding members of the MIOTY Alliance include US chip vendor Texas Instruments, German tech firm Diehl Group, German automation outfit ifm, Austrian oil-and-gas specialist Ragsol, German electronics firm Stackforce, and UK sensor maker WIKA, plus BehrTech, which licenses the technology, and sells branded solutions. In a sign of the new convergence in the LPWA space, Sigfox operator Heliot Europe has also recently joined the alliance.
Heliot Europe is promoting MIOTY as an alternative to Sigfox, plusLoRaWAN and NB-IoT. At the end of last year, LORIOT, another newer member, presented an upgrade (version 8.0; ‘Hummingbird’) of its IoT network management solution (NMS) as “the first hybrid system” to include support for MIOTY service centre capabilities, alongside its long-standing usage of LoRaWAN network server. Sigfox-parent Unabiz is heavily promoting LPWA convergence.
Meanwhile, the France-based metering division of Germany-headquartered Diehl Group, one of the founding members of the MIOTY Alliance, has announced an “all-inclusive” MIOTY network implementation service for utilities and cities. A statement said the package covers “the entire implementation process, from obtaining the right government authorizations to on-the-ground engineering and integrating use cases”.
The firm has released a white paper about the metering challenges facing water utilities, specifically – which “highlights the potential to address them using MIOTY”. It said: “MIOTY can considerably improve water resource management by optimising key areas such as network efficiency, leak detection and non-revenue wWater (NRW)… [It] offers long range coverage, reliability, extreme robustness to interference, and excellent interoperability, as well as exceptional data security.”
Meanwhile, the new LORIOT NMS introduces features and upgrades on the back-end and front-end of its server infrastructure, plus a redesigned user interface. According to a statement, key upgrades include: “scalability and performance improvements, new gateways supported, Datacake IoT platform integration, and passive roaming improvements… [plus LORIOT’s own] LoRaWAN Roaming Hub… to extend [network] coverage… [via] other LoRaWAN networks”.
It goes on: “One of the most remarkable new features of v8.0 is the introduction of the MIOTY service centre. Next to the already operating LoRaWAN network server, the version 8.0 will be the first release of the LORIOT hybrid network management system that is able to set up and operate hybrid (using both LoRaWAN and MIOTY protocols) radio networks on a large scale.”
