FREMONT, Calif. — The LoRa Alliance and Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) today released a new whitepaper that demonstrates hybrid Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN connectivity increases market opportunity and ROI for an array of Internet of Things (IoT) use cases.
The paper, Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Trials – An Overview of Use Cases Across Regions Combining Two Technologies, provides details on practical trials and proof of concept deployments (POCs), representing a variety of use cases implemented across different geographies and verticals.
“Adding LoRaWAN to Wi-Fi using network mutualization is a cost-effective approach to deployment using the existing base of Wi-Fi access points. This offers a significant opportunity for Wi-Fi providers to expand their addressable business on complementary use cases and cover both broadband applications and massive IoT leveraging the license-exempt spectrum,” reads the press release announcing the whitepaper’s availability.
The two organizations say the unlicensed Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN technologies enable participation in the 5G ecosystem and developing capabilities for IoT roaming, using the WBA’s OpenRoaming platform.
The joint-trial work involved collaboration between members of the LoRa Alliance and the WBA, including the following 11 companies: Actility, Abeeway, Boingo Wireless, Charter Communications, Cisco, Kerlink, Lacuna Space, Nesten, Simplycity, Skyhook and Semtech.
The use cases covered in the whitepaper include:
- smart buildings: multi-family dwellings (Boingo Wireless, United States)
- smart city: smart light pole (Charter Communications, United States)
- smart city: energy management and people attendance monitoring (Simplycity, Australia)
- smart city: interoperability between Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN at the network level (Nesten, Skyhook, United States)
- smart interconnection: OpenRoaming & LoRaWAN (ORL) (Cisco, Switzerland)
- smart retail: Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN in-store retail analytics (Kerlink, Smart Traffik, The Netherlands)
- smart tracking: tracking with Semtech LoRa Edge and Lacuna satellites to resolve human-wildlife conflict (Lacuna Space, IRNAS and Smart Parks, South Africa)
- smart transportation: asset tracking for the automotive industry (Actility, Abeeway, Volvo, France)
“2020 has been a turning point for IoT adoption, and unlicensed wireless technologies are a key driver supporting the rapidly accelerating digital transformation,” said Donna Moore, CEO and chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance, in the press release. “This latest collaboration between our Alliances clearly shows that Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN can deliver real business advantages and improved ROI.”
Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of WBA added: “Homes, cities, transport systems and retailers all stand to benefit from these findings. In proving this large variety of use cases, we are able to demonstrate how Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN can work together to augment capacity, coverage and increase ROI, and we start to see real commercial drivers for the two technologies working side by side and resolving interoperability through OpenRoaming.”
To access the full white paper, please click here.
