Highlights from America's Top LoRaWAN Industry Event!

The LoRaWAN Live Orlando has proven to be a resounding success, with attendance from a diverse range of industries and regions. This event has served as a unifying platform for enterprises, device manufacturers, system integrators, distributors, developers, solution providers, educational institutions, IoT alliances, and influencers, among others. We extend our gratitude to our partners and customers for their participation and to the LoRa Alliance for facilitating this global gathering.  

“Coming out of another great event, we are very happy to have demonstrated the latest LoRaWAN features in action, shared our deep insights with the larger community, met with current partners and new ones, all under one roof in few days thanks to the LoRa Alliance. The vibrant event served as a proof of the LoRaWAN’s momentum in building Massive IoT. We are looking forward to continuing this trend in other regions with the future events.”

Extending LoRaWAN Coverage Using the Relay Feature

At the event, one of the most exciting features discussed was the relay, a brand-new and powerful addition to technology. The relay feature allows battery-operated low-cost nodes to extend the coverage of LoRaWAN gateways beyond their physical limits. Thior Santander, Actility’s North and Latin America Director of Operations, and Davide Orifiamma, Semtech’s Director of R&D Electronic and Firmware, gave a detailed presentation on this feature, including their experience with its implementation.

LoRaWAN Relay Demo

Actility and Semtech not only gave a talk about this feature, but also demonstrated the very first implementation at the LoRaWANLive Orlando Marketplace. Thior and Davide gave an interactive demo, showcasing how LoRaWAN now goes beyond the limits of physics.

Empowering Device and Solution Makers with LoRa Alliance Standards

Several recent standard specifications coming out of LoRa Alliance aim accelerating development and deployment of LoRaWAN device and solutions. In this talk, Actility CTO and LoRa Alliance Technocal Committee Chair Alper Yegin covered the QR codes, application codecs, FUOTA, and global activation via roaming and activation (Join Servers).

LoRaWAN Meets AI

Alex Guskov, Actility’s Director of Business Development in Americas, presented an inspiring talk about combining LoRaWAN with AI to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. In his talk, ‘LoRaWAN Meets AI,’ Alex discussed how AI/ML capabilities on the edge (on end-devices) have made it possible to use LoRaWAN for sensor cases that normally require transporting large amounts of data wirelessly, such as vibration sensors and cameras. He covered LoRaWAN-based use cases that leverage AI both at the edge and also in the cloud, showing the power of these two technologies working together to drive innovation and solve real-world problems.

LoRaWAN Standards and Architecture Evolution

Prior to the Awards Ceremony at the LoRaWANLive Orlando, Alper presented the latest developments on the interop standardization front. He explained how the LoRa Alliance reacted to the market demand and expanded the end-to-end LoRaWAN architecture with the help of last year’s relay, IPv6, roaming hub, and application payload codec API publications. He also shared the list of active task forces and working groups under the Technical Committee, showing the momentum of the work. He welcomed non-members to join the Alliance to be part of this revolutionary development, and noted that all members including Adopter-level ones are welcome to participate in the subgroups underneath the Technical Committee.

LoRaWAN in South America Go-To-Market Strategies and Obstacles Based on Deployed Projects in Peru & Chile

StraconTech has been leading the adoption of LoRaWAN-based IoT technologies in Chile and Peru. Given the highly fragmented and regulated market of South America, there are plenty of obstacles that may come your way when working in these markets. StraconTech CTO Jonathan Prieto Abasolo and Actility Business Development Director Alex Guskov joined on the stage to share their experience and know-how that may be interesting to anyone who plans to engage in these markets.

Scaling Businesses on Community Networks Panel

Alper participated in the Scaling Businesses on Community Networks Panel that was led by Helium Foundation CEO Abhay Kumar, and including Senzary CEO Eric Schummer, and Seeed Technology Product Director Kevin Yang as the other participants. Alper talked about how integration among public, private, and community networks are on the rise, and how Actility’s roaming hub ThingPark Exchange is playing a crucial role in this development.

Technical Committee Meeting

The marketing part of the event was preceded by the committee meetings covering the Technical, Certification, and Marketing Committees. The two-day Technical Committee meetings were led by the committee chair Alper Yegin.

LoRaWAN 101 Tutorial

Alper presented the LoRaWAN protocols, architecture, and standard, followed by a Q&A.

Actility Table at the Marketplace

Our colleagues Thior and Alex demonstrated the latest and greatest products and features of the multi-radio LPWAN core network infra ThingPark and the LoRaWAN-connected indoor-outdoor multi-GNSS + WiFi + BLE-based tracker Abeeway. Demonstrations included the very-first implementation of the LoRaWAN relay feature in collaboration with Semtech, indoor-outdoor tracking leveraging roaming, field-upgradable ThingPark-ready latest Catalyst IR1110 gateway from Cisco, a set of smart building use cases running on our partner (and generous neighbor) Senzary’s IoTLogiq application platform, and the cute, colorful yet powerful Kuando Busylights. We were very happy to visit several other ecosystem players’ tables, meet old friends and make new ones. Looking forward to the next great event from LoRaAlliance!

LoRaWAN in Action! 

What is more real than talking about this super-exciting LoRaWAN technology is showing it in action. 

With that in mind, once again Actility has deployed a venue-wide LoRaWAN network in LoRaWANLive Orlando event to showcase indoor-outdoor tracking and multiple smart building use cases, the so-called LoRaWANinAction!  

We did that together with several partners from LoRaWAN ecosystem. Indoor gateways were provided by Cisco. They included the latest Cisco Catalyst IR1101 with the pluggable LoRaWAN module that comes pre-integrated with our ThingPark network platform. 

We have complemented the indoor coverage with the outside wide-area coverage provided by Helium. The two networks interconnected to each other via the ThingPark Exchange peering hub. That’s how we could track users with Abeeway trackers both indoor and outdoor. 

In addition to the trackers and beacons, the smart building sensors were also provided by Senzary, who also provided the application platform IoTLogIQ to manage the associated applications. 

And the most colorful part of the demonstration was provided by Plenom, Busylight alert lights. 

All devices were provisioned on our ThingPark Enterprise-powered ThingPark Community platform (which is free for non-commercial use: community.thingpark.org). 

We were very proud to show how we collaborate and showcase real-life LoRaWAN use cases. We are looking forward to doing it again in the future LoRa Alliance meetings, and even at the other events. 

Media Session

We joined the Media Session with our latest PR with the Nova Lans and Helium Foundation. Alper and Helium Foundation CEO Abhay Kumar were on stage introducing how several public, private, and community LoRaWAN networks (both terrestrial and satellite-based) can now access Helium coverage through ThingPark Exchange, which enables both the technical and now also the commercial interconnection. Check out our joint PR with Nova Labs for more details. 

After an exciting and informative LoRaWAN Live Orlando event, one thing stands out as particularly special: our Software Development Engineer, Mostafa Ibrahim, received a Leadership Award for his outstanding work leading the Application Payload Codec API TF and delivering the TS013 specification. This specification is a game-changer for device makers, as they can now develop their codecs (JavaScript-based binary-to-JSON translators) once and deploy them on any application platform. Mostafa’s leadership and hard work have made this possible, and we are grateful for his contributions to the LoRaWAN community. This award is a testament to Mostafa’s dedication and expertise, and we are proud to have him as part of our team.

"Great leadership is not just about achieving goals, but also about inspiring and empowering the team to do the same. I am honored to have received this award, but this achievement would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the Task Force and Technical Committee members.

This accomplishment has significantly reduced deployment complexity for device manufacturers and application server providers by simplifying the onboarding process, making it easier to integrate devices, and thereby facilitating massive LoRaWAN deployments.

Together, we have made a significant contribution to the LoRaWAN community and the wider tech industry, and I am excited to see the impact of our work in the years to come”

In addition to the Actility-led activities, we also had our partners Cisco, Kwant, and MarineSync on stage as well to talk about their latest products and services, and our collaboration.

To know more about any of these activities, or other offerings from Actility, please contact us!