Locked down shouldn’t mean left out
13 December 2021
A new definition of a remote location might be less about the speed with which you can get to the nearest big city, but rather more about the speed of your internet connection.
The global pandemic served to further sharpen the importance of online connectivity. It also highlighted that the imbalances in society are not just financial, they are digital as well. What’s more, the digital divide is not simply a reflection of financial status; it is more often a reflection of location.
Find out more London borough gets smart
10 December 2021
The London Borough of Croydon will introduce a network of smart bus shelters early next year to provide free public Wi-Fi, traffic sensors and air quality monitoring. US firm VALO Smart City will install, operate and maintain the smart bus shelters located in 185 locations across the district. VALO signed a 10-year deal with Croydon Council following a tender process in what is understood to be a multi-million-pound deal”. The smart bus shelters will also offer LED edge lighting, voice announcements and accessibility improvements for people with disabilities, along with noise and traffic sensors.
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Report says ‘64% of IT execs prefer simplified path to IoT deployment’
10 December 2021
According to a new report by Oracle, 64% of enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) decision-makers would opt for an “off-the-shelf” IoT solution over a custom-built offering, indicating a market shift in the way enterprises are viewing IoT adoption. Meanwhile, 42% of respondents’ projects were completed (or expected to be completed) in under six months and 88% in under one year. Another key highlight from the report is that almost 90% of projects were described by the respondents as “fundamental” or “very important” to their core business, and just over half of all projects are visible to their customers.
Find out more Cellular and non-cellular networks for enterprise IoT
08 December 2021
Shahzad Nadeem, head of smart cities business at Plextek
The rapidly growing number of IoT devices and applications usually have specific communications requirements such as low cost, low power, long range and low data rates, while base stations may need to cater for many thousands of devices. As technologies such as Zigbee, Wi-Fi and conventional cellular don’t always meet these demands, the foundations have been laid for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) non-cellular standards like LoRa and SigFox along with cellular standards like NB-IoT and LTE-M.
Sigfox and LoRa were developed by French companies around 2010. Since then, the LoRa Alliance has standardised LoRa protocols and Sigfox is in discussions with 3GPP for standardisation, while the development of NB-IoT and LTE-M standards are being led by 3GPP. But it is the backing from major market players that is making LoRa and NB-IoT more attractive for IoT use cases compared to Sigfox.
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