Inconsistency in crop yield is a major concern for farmers. Even with green houses presenting a controlled environment for crop growth, pests and disease are unavoidable. Additionally, a farmer’s lack of knowledge on the conditions in the farm’s soil presents further challenges. The amount of fertilizer used on crops is often left up to the farmer’s discretion. This usually results in over- or under-dosing, which affects crop growth directly. Human error has the largest impact on a crop's yield, with inefficient or inconsistent irrigation and errors in fertilization having serious negative effects on crop health.

In the past five years, farmers in the Cameron Highlands, which are located 250 kilometers from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, have taken the initiative to implement a simple monitoring system for their farms’ soil health. However, cost and connectivity presented a serious challenge for the farmers. Smarter solutions and machine-to-machine (M2M) services are often expensive and not available in rural areas. End users, typically the farmers themselves, are naturally very concerned with a solution’s power consumption, availability and reliability, as these factors directly affect the cost to deploy and operate these solutions. For the Cameron Highlands, the region’s various hills and valleys created additional challenges for service providers and reduced network signal strength. As a result, the farmers turned to solutions based on Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN® protocol.

The market for smart utility meters is growing at a rapid pace. A recent report by ABI Research predicts there will be an installed base of 1.34 billion meters by 2023*. IHS Markit forecasts almost 50 million smart water meters will ship globally in 2023, a number which is roughly four times its size in 2017. Year over year, the number of new meter shipments for water, gas, heat and electricity is increasing at a rate of four to five percent according to IHS. Globally, the proportion of smart meters will soon exceed half of all meters shipped annually. The largest utility adopters of Internet of Things (IoT) technology for smart metering devices are electricity (64 percent), followed by gas (38 percent) and then water (26 percent). Behind these strong growth numbers, the adoption of smarter technologies for metering is predicted to continue for the foreseeable future.

Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN® protocol offer several advantages for the Internet of Things (IoT) that have enabled it to lead in a competitive marketplace. Perhaps the most important of these advantages is LoRa devices’ unique capacity for long-range data communication. A single LoRa-based gateway provides deep indoor connectivity in underground or city environments, and connectivity to LoRa-enabled end nodes from up to 30 miles away in rural environments. This is especially important in parts of the world where Cellular connectivity is scarce or nonexistent. In places such as these, LoRaWAN-based networking and LoRa-enabled end nodes provide the quickest to deploy and most cost-efficient option for IoT connectivity, enabling smarter solutions that could not otherwise exist.

Lauak Group is a major aviation industry supplier with headquarters in the southwest of France at Hasparren-Ayherre in the French Basque Country, with factories in Portugal, Canada, Mexico and India. In the Basque language, “Lauak” means “the four,” representing the four factories that merged when the organization was created. Lauak Group’s esteemed customer list includes Airbus, Bombardier, Dassault, Embraer, Safran, and many more.

The 2019 InfoAg Conference recently concluded in St. Louis, Missouri. The two and a half day event highlighting precision agriculture consisted of a large program of panels, conferences and workshops, with an exhibition of approximately 200 booths in the main hall of the majestic Union Station Hotel. The conference provided educational and networking opportunities for more than 1,200 registered attendees. The annual event is an opportunity for scientists, farmers and solution manufacturers to meet with leaders in the precision and digital agriculture world, and collaborate with experts in Internet of Things (IoT), data, robotics, fertilization management, and more.

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.

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.

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.