For businesses, IoT provides the opportunity to transform their business, achieving new efficiencies and savings, providing more real-time data that helps make faster and more informed decision-making about their customer’s needs or changes in market; leading companies to improve their service, design new products and grow their business.
How to optimize
What’s needed for businesses to realize the benefits of IoT? There are three critical elements: devices, connectivity and applications. Devices with sensors linked over a long-range wireless network that support and deliver a wide range of applications, which drive top line savings and bottom line revenue growth.
Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) are gaining significant traction as the popular choice, with many leading analysts predicting that LPWA networks will ultimately address over half of the total IoT connectivity market. As provider of the first and only long range (LoRa®) LPWA network in the U.S. with over 125,000 square miles of coverage in more than 100 US cities. It is critical to have an open, service-centric LPWA network based on the LoRa radio frequency standard to support the widest range of IoT applications.
LPWA networks offer a number of compelling advantages over competing wireless IoT technologies for supporting and delivering commercial applications: a low cost network infrastructure, supporting devices that require low power consumption and that has considerable range and scale. LoRa LPWA networks can support a rich and diverse ecosystem of IoT applications for a variety of markets, such as smart agriculture, water metering, smart cities, smart buildings, and oil and gas.
Efficiency in action
One example of a LoRa-based application is a heating fuel delivery automation solution deployed across multiple regions in the U.S. It leverages IoT and is proving out big savings for its customers. Customers of the solution are heating fuel dealers and distributors, including farming cooperatives. Dealers typically see 30 percent or more in annual cost savings due to the operational efficiencies gained by being able to optimally plan deliveries.
In Southern California, a trial is underway for an IoT LoRa application running over an LPWAN to track water usage from an aquifer supporting the region’s farms. This wireless smart metering solution is monitoring groundwater pumping data and connecting to LPWAN to automatically deliver this data to local regulators. The solution significantly reduces costs of the data collection process and dramatically improves its accuracy over the current self-reporting of groundwater use, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership.
These and many more applications across multiple verticals are happening today.
