Senet VP: Cellular a potential disruptor of LoRA, but IoT space big enough to support competition
CHICAGO–The internet of things (IoT) market is marked by a variety of competing connectivity types both standardized, like NB-IoT and LTE Cat M1, and those based on access like LoRa and Sigfox. The long range IoT network technology features secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services, and is backed by an trade group the LoRa Alliance. Senet is a LoRa network provider, and according to Vice President of Business Development John Nye, the company is seeing strong adoption in the utility sector as water, power and other providers connect their infrastructure.
“We’re cracking the utility space,” Nye told Enterprise IoT Insights at the recent Enterprise IoT World event. “We’re cracking the water space. That one is showing itself to be solid. The utility business, we’ve got it reasonably well-resourced and we just need to keep putting points of the board–get them activated, get them moving.”
Senet uses a revenue-sharing model wherein the part that provides the utility network gets rebates for its own use of the network. “If other devices show up on the network, you get compensated for that. We’ve come up with ways to take the cost out of it. And we think that’s going to continue to attract operators.”
Nye described a typical network build for a utility which “purchased the hardware for the build out. In this case they used other municipal assets, water towers and other buildings and so forth. That’s a big part of our go-forward strategy. We’ve launched this whole concept of [LPWAN virtualization].” Senet also developed an proprietary OSS/BSS systems as well as a cloud-based management software package.
In terms of potential market disruptors, Nye said cellular IoT network providers, instead of betting the farm on LTE Cat M1, for instance, “Those guys should figure out ways to partner with us. There’s going to be plenty of room–there’s going to be 60 billion devices–if you do want to play.”
