Actility and Sagemcom bring roaming to LoRaWAN network operators with pre-release implementation of LoRa Alliance draft standard

Actility and Sagemcom, pioneering industry leaders in Low Power Wide Area network software, today announce the availability of roaming between LoRaWAN networks, based on early implementation of the draft standard proposed by the LoRa Alliance™, which will be rolled out widely by operators over the coming months. 

This roaming capability will be demonstrated on Actility’s booth at MWC (8.0C3). Thanks to these features, operators will be able to enhance coverage within countries by network sharing, and enable international use cases for customers by roaming across borders. LoRaWAN private network owners will also be able to share their network coverage with public network operators.

“The Standardisation team working on roaming at the LoRa Alliance has done a fantastic job in specifying all the needed elements, from provisioning to key management and “back office” functions, to enable roaming between LoRaWAN networks,” explains Actility founder & CTO Olivier Hersent.  “We have seen a very strong pull from communication service provider customers, so Actility has invested very heavily to bring an early implementation of the latest stable draft specification to market and gain practical experience as soon as possible, as you can see in our demonstration. Our implementation enables network sharing and roaming between LoRaWAN networks using ThingPark Wireless IoT core network platform, and networks equipped with SagemCom and other standard compliant network servers.”

“By implementing roaming features in their solutions accordingly with LoRa Alliance requirements, Sagemcom and their partners are speeding up the adoption of IoT by extending the coverage, the mobility and the cooperation between the operators. It also emphasizes the power of the Alliance by demonstrating the partnership and the interoperability between the different members and their solutions” says Eric Rieul, Sagemcom Energy & Telecom CEO.

“Roaming is essential for Objenious customers to fully benefit from LPWA network capabilities across all their locations and business internationally and globally, and we’re very pleased to see this early implementation which now contributes to enable LoRaWAN roaming”, says Stephane Allaire, Objenious CEO.

“Inmarsat enables connectivity around the world, serving customers in remote areas, as well as industries which drive the global economy. We have recently extended the capabilities of our network to make LoRaWAN connectivity available from any ground station, and we are now able to offer low-power WAN connectivity anywhere. With the help of this new LoRa Alliance roaming standard, we will bring seamless ultra-low-power connectivity to a new range of mobile use cases worldwide,” comments Paul Gudonis, President, Inmarsat Enterprise.

“Orange solutions based on LoRa® will be extended worldwide in July 2017, providing focused coverage to cities, harbours or industrial sites.  LoRaWAN® standardised roaming is a key complementary pillar of our strategy, to optimise deployment costs and reliability for our business customers. Orange already provides a LoRa® based end-to-end solution in France supporting more than 60 Live B2B projects in numerous verticals such as smart cities, smart building, parking, smart home, industry, supply chain, tracking, agriculture.”, says Olivier Ondet, IoT & Analytics SVP, Orange Business Services.

“LPWA is a core technology for the future of industry globally, and the dynamic manufacturing base which drives the Taiwanese economy is already turning to the IoT to optimise supply chain and logistics. The early availability of roaming, as demonstrated by Actility at MWC, and the global technology platform they now provide, is key to extending our solutions worldwide as quickly as possible,” explains Asia-Pacific Telecom President Tim Chen.

Jasper Snijder, KPN’s EVP New Business adds, “The Internet of Things doesn’t stop at national borders. For many use cases, for instance asset tracking, it is important for our customers that ‘things’ remain connected across the globe. As the first operator in the world with a LoRaWAN network covering the entire country, we are soon going to be able to offer our customers multi-national LPWAN connectivity and coverage.

“We think that roaming is a key capability for LoRaWAN, which will support many interesting use cases for our customers. We are seeing strong market demand for roaming capabilities, and are backing the Lora Alliance roaming standard. We’re pleased to see companies like Actility offering early implementations of that draft standard, which means that our customers will be able to start implementing those use cases today,” adds Lars Petermann, Head of Smart Solution for IoT at telent GmbH.

“Thanks to roaming we will be able to offer a seamless cross-border experience, which will unlock a huge potential in the market,” says Frederic Lhostte, Proximus Head of Advanced Telco Services. “It enables us to exploit new use cases, in the mobility sector as well as allow us to advance talks with companies that have business activities in a variety of countries. In addition, it will boost a closer relationship between operators in different countries that back LoRaWAN to jointly target international customers.”

Roaming offers extended coverage for specific use cases by leveraging collaboration between multiple networks, and provides increased capacity and extended device battery life in areas where there are overlapping multiple networks, and finally, it enables LoRaWAN Service Providers to better manage capacity and optimise their coverage. Roaming also enables devices to connect to different LPWA networks depending on the local coverage, and enables use cases in which assets need to be monitored and tracked as they move between countries, for example in baggage monitoring or parcel/shipment tracking.