In January, the industry alliance behind LoRa stated that 100 network operators around the world were using its standard. This placed LoRa ahead of the other IoT standards it is competing with by a significant margin. What makes LoRa the leading choice for IoT connectivity? In a word, simplicity. With LoRa, end users can set up their own gateway, utilizing their own hardware built on a LoRa-compatible chip. Or, they can purchase prefabricated LoRa hardware, like Raspberry Pi. This is the main differentiator for LoRa over the other competing low-power, low-bandwidth, and long-range protocol standards for the Internet of Things. And maybe why it is becoming the most popular. The following article details a few real world case studies that have implemented IoT connectivity successfully using LoRa.
Cattle may be at home on the range, but modern ranchers need to be able to find their wayward cattle, and inefficiencies in tracking cost the cattle industry around US $4.8 billion a year. At a recent conference about connected devices in Amsterdam, Jan Willem Smeenk of the Dutch company Sodaq and Thomas Telkamp of the startup Lacuna Space talked about connecting cattle into a future Internet of bovines.
Smeenk’s company builds solar-powered ear tags that alert ranchers to the whereabouts and well-being of their cattle. The tags work up to distances of about 5 kilometers via LoRa, one of the leading low-power, long-range standards for the Internet of Things (IoT). Telkamp’s company is launching LoRa gateways on satellites, which could one day help ranchers track down cattle that stray beyond their owners’ local coverage areas.
