For those of you that have been in Pro AV for decades, confusion is not something new. Remember the analog sunset? Remember HDCP? Remember going over-IP? Fortunately, confusion is a phenomenon that disappears over time.

Smart home automation makes it possible to proactively heat your home from the road, automatically close your garage each evening and conserve energy, among many other modern conveniences. 

With leading long range and low power, LoRaWAN networks are being utilized today in hundreds of innovative applications for smart cities, homes and buildings, agriculture, metering, supply chain and logistics, and more. The LoRa Alliance® is committed to enabling the large-scale deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications operating on the LoRaWAN® protocol. Members benefit from a vibrant ecosystem of active contributors offering solutions, products and services to create new and sustainable business opportunities worldwide.

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) has officially created a new working group under its Technical Committee TC294 to specify a new adaptation layer for M-Bus protocol used mainly in smart water meters, smart gas meters and smart heat meters. This new working group, called CEN TC294 WG7, is led by expert from Birdz, a subsidiary of Nova Veolia, a successful leader in the European smart metering ecosystem, and member of the LoRa Alliance®. In 2019, Semtech hosted a webinar with Birdz to highlight its proven use cases for transforming municipal water distribution networks leveraging the LoRaWAN® protocol for greater efficiency and cost savings.

Enterprises are typically challenged with sensor solutions that monitor assets and facilities. Solutions today are not pre-integrated with the underlying network, causing long deployment cycles and difficulty to scale. They can have multiple dashboards and interfaces, requiring more time and resources to identify problems and business-impacting trends.

Asset tracking is one of the most widely deployed applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT’s economic impact on factories, retail settings, work sites, offices, and homes could total as much as $6.3 trillion by 2025, according to McKinsey Global. A variety of industries, including home and building, healthcare, agriculture, and food services in addition to the industrial and logistics markets, are investing in smarter technologies to replace siloed legacy systems with automated asset management solutions. Many existing geolocation applications are power hungry and require multiple devices, software and services from multiple vendors, resulting in increased complexity and cost.

In August, 2020, Semtech, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and TensorIoT announced its collaboration on two Internet of Things (IoT) kits for LoRaWAN® networks: (1) Smart Building (2) Asset Tracking. The kits accelerate the development of smarter, more efficient solutions for Enterprises and Systems Integrators by making use of LoRaWAN connectivity with the integration of AWS’s leading IoT services. The kits accelerate the development of simple, effective IoT applications for Smart Building and Asset Tracking use cases through the use of the LoRaWAN® protocol and AWS IoT Cloud services based on a flexible serverless architecture.

As Internet of Things (IoT) customers discover the benefits of LoRa® devices for applications as diverse as water metering, smart lighting or tracking rhinos, there is increasing demand for “location of things” services. Location is a vital component of the IoT that encompasses the ability of things to sense and communicate their geographic position. Location data helps organize, track and account for the billions of Internet-connected devices based on sensors and other location-centric elements in them. The ability to capture location data forms the basis of location-based services, and starts with the physical radio frequency (RF) technologies that interact with the world around them. Several technologies, such as GPS, LoRa and others, are able to provide outdoor location information. However, for precise indoor location where GPS has no tangible reach, and to enable continuous location detection or tracking, indoor positioning systems (IPS) technologies such as Wi-Fi come into play.

During the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic when we are mostly confined to our homes, we are spending an increased amount of time in front of screens. This includes attending online meetings, taking video calls, playing video games, watching television, and also working longer hours on our computers. A high quality audiovisual (AV) experience is a must these days and thanks to the high definition digital displays and high definition multimedia interfaces (HDMI), we are able to experience high speed, high resolution AV with higher pixel depths and greater aspect ratios.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications for LoRaWAN® networks have been deployed on every populated continent and even currently orbit the Earth via satellite. More than 158 million end-devices featuring LoRa® have been deployed, with use cases ranging from tracking cattle on connected ranches to monitoring energy use in the home. In January 2020, Semtech shared examples of how LoRa devices and LoRaWAN networks provide a unique combination of flexibility and scalability, connecting applications to better care for, conserve and connect our world in our LoRa Everywhere campaign. Read the LoRa Everywhere blog to learn more about those choice applications creating a smarter planet today.