Industry whitepaper discusses the Internet of Things

Jim Morrish, Director, Machina Research, and author, commented: Short range connectivity technologies may seem like a good choice for the Internet of Things, but they variously suffer from serious difficulties of network authentication, blocking by corporate firewalls, poor battery life, poor reach and unmanaged networks. As a result, a high proportion of Internet of Things applications would benefit significantly from a wide area network (WAN) connection.”

Morish also cautions against simply reusing existing WAN technologies: “Due to high end-point and usage costs, short battery lives and the difficulty in providing ubiquitous network coverage to devices mounted deep indoors or other hard-to-reach locations, MNOs are unable to address those needs fully with their existing cellular network standards. Fortunately now, new solutions such as Neul’s, are emerging that are designed specifically for M2M and are able to reach devices in remote areas, indoors or underground, with a long battery life – often over 10 years from a single AA battery."

Machina Research believes that these LPWA networks have the potential to connect 17bn devices by the year 2022. The whitepaper also reviews the difficulties that MNOs face in delivering solutions for the Internet of Things with existing GSM or LTE networks. The importance of the LPWA opportunity for MNOs and their potential strengths in delivering such a system competitively are also explored.

Neul is working with others to offer this as an open standard solution. This will be designed to meet MNO requirements for an LPWA technology that can easily be deployed using their existing base stations and physical infrastructure, along with a low cost, cloud based core networking technology to which it connects.

“Ultimately, MNOs can be the winners in the Internet of Things space, but they can’t do it with their existing technologies. Coverage needs to be much better than cellular, battery lives need to be much longer and modules need to be super-cheap, well under $5 in volume. As a service, MNOs must then deliver high availability core transport networks, data access services and BSS/OSS functions at prices that are both aggressive yet highly profitable. Neul enables them to do just that, by providing a simple but highly integrated chip to enable those low-cost modules to communicate with their existing RAN infrastructure and by providing a massively scalable, secure, cloud-based Service Manager to deliver the core network switching functions, security and data access APIs. Together gives MNOs the tools they need to deliver low cost, high QoS connectivity to huge numbers of devices so effectively that they can dominate this market,” comments Stan Boland, CEO, Neul.