What are the keys to a successful IoT strategy? Interview

When you rely on thousands of connected wireless sensors in the field, the last thing you want is to have to manually reboot or upgrade them one by one every time they stop working. Rock-solid stability is arguably the holy grail for businesses or systems that rely on the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the more you have, the more crucial this is. If a sensor fails only once a month and you have a million of them, that means more than 30,000 failures per day!

Unfortunately, a lot of people will just conclude that the “IoT doesn’t work” after such occurrences. But in fact, more reliable IoT network technologies such as LoRaWAN®   have emerged from the experimental stages and are being increasingly applied in the real world. These technologies make our world more efficient and contribute to the transition of our economies to a more sustainable model.

IoT is about far more than just geeky university experiments. Its real-world applications encompass industrial stability and security at scale, and this requires hard work. At Actility, more than 100 expert engineers have worked for over ten years to make sure that our customers’ projects are deployed on time, within budget, and – above all – able to scale to millions of sensors.

We focus on industrial radio management, as well as providing solid answers to questions such as “how do you upgrade a system with over a million devices without a glitch?”, or “what happens if the network restarts after a power outage?”

Above all, it’s our experience that’s the foundation of our success. For the past 10 years we have been providing commercial customer support worldwide, and our systems support a 120% year-on-year growth in the number of connected devices. We have connected thousands of Smart Office devices, and developed automated meter-reading projects for millions of water or gas meters where LoRaWAN®  is clearly the best communication technology.

But, perhaps, some of our most successful projects involve geolocation and tracking.

The technology developed by our subsidiary Abeeway is a new generation of fused multi-technology geolocation which works indoors and outdoors. Bouygues Construction Group uses it to track more than 20,000 tools and toolboxes, while Volvo Group is greatly improving its supply chain by locating manufactured trucks in its factories globally.

The technology is also very popular with security, safety and health applications, in factories, oil and gas and smart construction projects, using LoRaWAN®  Smart Badges. For instance, a major Japanese manufacturer of optics and reprography products, Olympus Corportation, uses them for proximity detection and contact tracing in factories to fight against COVID-19.

LoRaWAN®  is quickly becoming the “Wi-Fi of IoT” standard, complementing cellular technologies by providing an unlicensed alternative for private networks and use cases which require a power efficiency that’s 10 to 20 times what 4G or 5G technologies can achieve. And Actility is right at the cutting edge when it comes to bringing these exciting technologies into the real world. Our ThingPark® platform supports both cellular and Low-power network (LPWAN) radio technologies such as LoRaWAN®.