Your new post is loading...
On the face of it, Orange has made a pretty strong commitment to LoRa, one of a crop of low-power, wide-area (or LPWA) network technologies designed to support more rudimentary Internet of Things (IoT) services.
In November, the French incumbent revealed it was building a LoRa network in 17 of France's biggest cities and would gradually roll out the network on a nationwide basis thereafter. A few months earlier, its venture capital arm, Orange Digital Ventures, stumped up $3 million of the $25 million in funding then raised by Actility, a French company developing OSS and BSS functionality for LoRa deployments. (See Telcos Invest in IoT Tech Startup.)
Yet Orange (NYSE: FTE) has acknowledged that LoRa is far from ideal. As an "open" technology, it holds strong attractions for the service provider over Sigfox, another LPWA technology that is fully proprietary. But this openness combined with LPWA's reliance on unlicensed spectrum is also problematic, admits Luc Bretones, the executive vice president of Orange's Technocentre-named product and design facilities.
May LoRa be as transitional as it looks promising ? Orange's indoor push through combining LoRa lamps with employee crowd-deployment is interesting nonetheless, as is its ambition to cover France by the end of 2016.
But with Intel reportedly readying a line of LTE-narrowband chips in the "couple of bucks" price range we could see the IoT landscape continue to evolve fast as Telcos will try to regain control.
May LoRa be as transitional as it looks promising ? Orange's indoor push through combining LoRa lamps with employee crowd-deployment is interesting nonetheless, as is its ambition to cover France by the end of 2016.
But with Intel reportedly readying a line of LTE-narrowband chips in the "couple of bucks" price range we could see the IoT landscape continue to evolve fast as Telcos will try to regain control.