New LoRa Alliance to Enable Worldwide Mobility for the IoT

Industry leaders plan to form the LoRa™ Alliance, with the goal of creating the largest, most powerful consolidated effort by industry leaders to enable the Internet of Things (IoT). The LoRa™ Alliance mission is to standardize Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) being deployed around the world to enable Internet of Things (IoT), machine-to-machine (M2M), smart city and industrial applications. The Alliance members intend to collaborate in order to drive the global success of the LoRa™ protocol (LoRaWAN™) by sharing knowledge and experience to ensure interoperability between Telecom operators.

The prospective initial Alliance members include leading IoT solution providers: Actility, Cisco, Eolane, IBM, Kerlink, IMST, MultiTech, Sagemcom, Semtech, and Microchip Technology, as well as lead telecom operators: Bouygues Telecom, KPN, SingTel, Proximus, Swisscom, and FastNet (part of Telkom South Africa). The LoRaâ„¢ Alliance is now accepting new members and is open to the application ecosystems.

The LoRaâ„¢ technology enables public or multi-tenant networks to connect multiple applications into the same network infrastructure, which will enable new applications for IoT, M2M, smart city, sensor networks and industrial automation applications. Device manufacturers and developers are proposing solutions at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with longer battery lifetime that often do not need a powerful cellular connection. The LoRaâ„¢ Alliance with the highly efficient LoRaWANâ„¢ protocol will enable new business models, making IoT more attractive to customers and end users. Projected IoT volumes can only be reached with a global approach to drive TCO lower.

“The LoRa technology is ideal to target battery operated sensors and low power applications, as a complement to M2M cellular connectivity,” said Richard Viel, Chief Operating Officer of Bouygues Telecom. “The LoRa Alliance is an essential step to ensure interoperability and, therefore, mobility across Europe for our customers.”

“To encourage the mass adoption of low cost, long range machine-to-machine connectivity, open ecosystems are critical,” said Dr. Thorsten Kramp, Master Inventor, IBM Research. “In addition to IBM's support of the LoRa Alliance, we have also released the IBM ‘LoRaWAN in C’ as open source under the Eclipse Public License, which provides a solid foundation for the development of a broad range of end devices compliant with the LoRaWAN specifications.”

“With LoRaWAN, entire cities or countries can be covered with a few base stations, no longer requiring the upfront rollout and maintenance of thousands of nodes as in traditional mesh networking. This has made IoT possible now, with minimal infrastructure investment,” said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility.

“Standardizing the communication to allow interoperability between large scale low power wide area network (LPWAN) deployments is essential to unlock the volumes for IoT,” said Erik Hoving, CTO of KPN.