The LoRa Alliance® met in Berlin last month and hosted our most successful LoRaWAN Live! day to date. While over 60 presenters took the stage across both the business and technology tracks, a major highlight was the Momenta Partners LoRaWAN Startup Challenge finals. In their own way, the finalists represented a microcosm of the LoRa Alliance ecosystem with their wide range of offerings, and their decision to use the LoRaWAN® protocol, which is based on best-of-breed LoRa® technology. The quantity and variety of challenge entries made it clear why LoRaWAN has become the de facto industry standard for low power wide area networks (LPWANs).

The Czech Republic in Central Europe has 10.6 million inhabitants over an area of 78,866 square kilometers (30,450 sq. miles). Since the 1970s, Czech Radiocommunications (CRA), based in Prague, has been the sole provider of broadcasting television and radio to citizens nationwide.

In the first installment of this two-part blog series, I touched on the Codec Triangle and several factors that make up a complex relationship between bandwidth, latency and quality in Pro AV. Additionally, I discussed video image compression and the harmful effects it can have on your picture. SDVoE™-based Pro AV solutions, built on Semtech’s BlueRiver® technology, are transforming the matrix switch and allowing uncompressed, low latency AV content up to 4K60 over standard Ethernet infrastructure. SDVoE-based solutions are uniquely equipped to fight the harmful effects of compression by leveraging Ethernet. In this blog, I will break down common compression codecs used in the AV space today and offer insight into the pros and cons of each for your application.

There can be no doubt that Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN® are very different networking protocols. Wi-Fi’s technology excels at short to medium range, high throughput and low latency communication, while LoRaWAN-based networks serve long range communication with small amounts of data. Despite these differences, these two networking protocols share some very similar characteristics, address largely complementary use cases and are often used in very collaborative ways.

The professional AV market continues to show strong growth with Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE™)-based infrastructure set to replace traditional matrix switching technology in the near future. SDVoE solutions, built on Semtech’s BlueRiver® technology, offer a few fundamental advantages for AV systems allowing uncompressed, low latency AV distribution over standard Ethernet infrastructure. In the AV world, a common gauge for how well your solution distributes AV content lies in how well it manages the “Codec Triangle.” Similar to the old adage: “good, fast and cheap, pick two,” the Codec Triangle refers to a similar scenario for bandwidth, latency and quality in regard to video compression and distribution over standard network infrastructure. In this two-part blog series, I will use the Codec Triangle to illustrate why BlueRiver-enabled SDVoE solutions deliver a better Pro AV user experience than any other AV distribution solution, including best in class AV over IP and matrix switch solutions.

A founding member of the SDVoE Alliance™, ZeeVee is creating innovative AV over RF and AV over IP solutions to enable some of the AV industry’s most demanding use cases. ZeeVee provides end-users the capacity to tackle challenging specifications and tight budgets with products that offer simultaneous RF and IP output, as well as one of Pro AV’s most extensive line of IP-based products. This impressive portfolio is built on Semtech’s BlueRiver® technology for Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE™) and has been successfully implemented worldwide for use in government, healthcare, broadcasting, hospitality, retail, and housing, among other industries.

In Paris this November, Semtech will be again exhibiting at European Utility Week, the world’s foremost annual smart utilities and metering conference. Last year in Vienna, the conference drew more than 12,000 visitors and this year’s attendance is expected to increase by half. We will be among the over 800 exhibiting companies at the Paris event, and will be showcasing Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN® protocol for innovative utility metering applications. This blog is part one of a three-part series on the benefits of LoRa for utilities leading up to the event.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly gaining momentum. Predictions indicate total spending on IoT technologies will reach $2.5 trillion in 2022, with the total number of devices deployed estimated to be in the billions. In a world with a billion connected devices, the reality is that many will need to be deployed in hard-to-reach places making the ability to service them very challenging and expensive. To accomplish this, developers and system integrators have to take every possible measure to provide technology that will help devices operate as efficiently as possible and prolong device life with future-proof designs.

Semtech has just returned from InfoComm 2019, professional AV’s most anticipated event of the year, which hosted more than 40,000 attendees and 1,000 exhibiting companies. Once again, the SDVoE Alliance™ booth was abuzz with interested visitors eager to learn more about Pro AV’s next step beyond the matrix switch. Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE™) solutions, enabled by Semtech’s BlueRiver® technology, were on full display with visitors being treated to many educational sessions from SDVoE Alliance representatives, as well as a head-to-head demonstration of the SDVoE-based solution versus the traditional matrix switch.

The LoRaWAN®-based ecosystem was back again at the LoRa Alliance®’s Annual Members Meeting and LoRaWAN Live, which took place in Berlin, Germany, June 11-13. With a record registration of approximately 527 individuals from all over the world, this year’s edition of the event was a three-day whirlwind of new products, important announcements and cutting-edge demonstrations of Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN networking protocol.