Network operator Hutchison Drei (Three) in Austria is rolling out a nationwide LoRaWAN network in its home work to provide industrial IoT connectivity for Industry 4.0 use cases, including for manufacturing companies, energy companies, solution providers, smart cities, retail companies, and facility management services. The project is described to be “progressing rapidly”. France-based Actility is providing the network server and platform for its management. Drei Austria said LoRaWAN, plus cellular 5G and NB-IoT, establishes the “technical foundation for sustainable IoT”.
A number of customers have been confirmed already. German infrastructure services firm Stadtwerke Wolfsberg, headquartered in Lower Saxony, is using the network for its smart water meter rollout, mainly, but also for smart city and industrial applications, including data monitoring for heat, gas, and electricity meters. Real estate company LaaPlus, based in Laa an der Thaya, is using the network to connect smart electricity and heat meters, also; it intends to connect water meters, also.
Drei is part of CK Hutchison Holdings Limited, which runs Three-branded networks in six European markets, plus Hong Kong and Macau. Hutchison Drei Austria has around four million users. Drei has selected Actility’s IoT network server and platform ThingPark Wireless to manage its expanding LoRaWAN infrastructure. Actility says ThingPark Wireless “powers almost all large scale LoRaWAN network deployments worldwide”. The platform interconnects with other licensed and unlicensed public networks as well as LoRaWAN-based local/private networks.
It provides “bi-directional drivers for the LoRaWAN device ecosystem”, said Actility, and automatically implements mediation connectors to sundry data/application platforms, including Azure IoT Hub and IoT Central, AWS IoT and Greengrass, Cumulocity, SAP, ThingWorx, plus others. Drei is also connected to ThingPark Exchange, described as an IoT Peering Hub for public and local/private LoRaWAN networks and satellites. It also supports Helium and Sigfox networks, and currently connects around 25 networks worldwide.
Rudolf Schrefl, chief executive at Drei Austria, said: “We are proud to play a role in accelerating Austria’s digitization, especially in the realms of industrial and utility applications. In conjunction with 5G and NB-IoT, LoRaWAN establishes the technical foundation for sustainable IoT solutions tailored for smart cities, energy-efficient buildings, intelligent agriculture, and more. In an era where natural and energy resources are both scarce and costly, real-time insights into field metrics have become the bedrock of sustainability.”
Olivier Hersent, chief executive at Actility, said: “Observability used to be the mantra in IT; now it also applies to the real world. Utilities and industries all over the world need to be more flexible, efficient, and resilient. They are accelerating their IoT programs to gain real-time hindsight’s into stock levels, implement predictive maintenance or demand-response programs. ‘Observe everything’ is the new mantra, and LoRaWAN is the technology designed for it.”
