The Things Enterprise?

Last week in Amsterdam The Things Network, who have arguably been one of the main driving forces behind the adoption of LoRaWAN, held this year's edition of their annual conference, The Things Conference.

The winner of the standards war around wide area networking protocols for the Internet of Things: LoRaWAN is a low-powered, low-bandwidth, and long-range protocol. Intended to connect remote sensors back to the internet via a gateway, you might well get 15km of range from an off-the-shelf LoRa radio. The downside is that the available bandwidth is going to be measured in bytes rather than kilobytes, or megabytes.

But the main advantage of LoRaWAN for most of us is that, of the competing standards, LoRa os the only one that is open. It’s the only system where building, and running, your own gateway and backend stack is possible. Competing standards like NB-IoT tie you into contracts with a provider, but with LoRa it's possible to buy your hardware, use open source software, and manage the entire system yourself.

However, a lot has changed over the course of the last few years. While the original community LoRa networks still exist, and you can still build your own LoRa network, the space is now dominated by enterprise companies.

Walking around The Things Conference last week I saw some big changes in the sort of products that companies were showing off. Unlike the early years, there were far fewer bare circuit boards on show, and far more white boxes.

One leading indicator of this was The Things Network's new Things Indoor Gateway Pro. The new gateway is the third generation of hardware from The Things Network.

The new gateway is a very different proposition than the two previous generations of hardware were, aimed squarely at enterprise deployment the new gateway provides "zero touch" provisioning. It's a far cry from the gateway hardware we saw five or six years ago, which was mostly built around a Raspberry Pi.

This commoditisation was evident throughout the event, with products like RAK Wireless' stick on trackers, just "peel and stick." Once you can assume infrastructure, you can start thinking about applications.

However the real difference this year was how mature the LPWAN field has started to feel, with more than a handful of talks about how to do away with the thing that's always held back the Internet of Things, the battery. The next big thing for the IoT is going to be energy harvesting, and storage, without traditional batteries.

Amongst these were talks and demos from Dracula Technology showing off their LAYER photovoltaic technology for ultra-low power devices, which can harvest energy in light levels down to 50 lux. Constructed using ink jet printing the photovoltaics and super-capacitors can be layered — see what they did there? — onto different shaped devices giving a lot of flexibility.

Lacuna space was also at this year's event, and. There's a long history of pushing the LoRaWAN standard beyond it's design limits, and Lacuna has been operating on orbit since back in 2020. The interesting thing about their approach is that when terrestrial LoRaWAN is available data flows over ‘normal’ public or private LoRa networks. It’s only when your device is out of coverage that it uses the satellite for backhaul.

With Lacuna now sharing a satellite bus with constellation operator OneWeb they're also feeling a lot more mature, and are now offering global coverage.

While we saw products overtaking platforms a year or two ago, The Things Conference 2024 was the first where it seemed that solutions overtook products. This year's conference sort of felt like a coming of age for LoRaWAN.