News
French incumbent becomes latest telco to back open IoT standard.
Orange this week gave further backing to the LoRaWAN Internet of Things (IoT) standard by joining the LoRa Alliance, the lobby group advocating for its adoption.
It is safe to say the French incumbent is already a big fan of the technology – in September 2015 it announced plans to deploy a LoRaWAN network across its home market.
Orange has been trialling the network in Grenoble and Paris, offering a ‘connected objects kit’ to start-ups to help them develop prototype LoRaWAN devices.
The deployment is in line with Orange’s Essentials 2020 plan, under which it aims to generate €600 million of revenue from IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) services by 2018.
"As a part of our new Essentials2020 strategic plan and the announcement of our France-wide LoRaWAN network, we have decided to take an active role in driving the success of the LoRa Alliance," said Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, senior executive vice president for innovation, marketing and technologies at Orange, in a statement on Wednesday.
LoRaWAN is proving popular at the moment because it is an open standard that uses unlicensed spectrum – which keeps the barriers to adoption low – and because it is further along in terms of development compared to competing technologies such as NB-IoT.
"We are excited that a leading global telecommunication operator like Orange, with a strong focus on open standardisation bodies, is joining the LoRa Alliance to contribute their knowledge and drive the further adoption and evolution of this open standard," said LoRa Alliance chairman Geoff Mulligan.
As well as Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Swisscom and SK Telecom are among the big-name telcos to have joined the Alliance and which are rolling out LoRaWAN networks.
