Microsoft has joined the board of the LoRa Alliance, the marketing and development body for the LoRaWAN low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) standard. Microsoft said LoRaWAN was a “critical connectivity fabric” for its work with digital twins, listing a bunch of customers that have used its Azure IoT platform with LoRaWAN, which rubs up against cellular NB-IoT and LTE-M in the IoT connectivity space, as well as non-cellular Sigfox, among others.
Tony Shakib, general manager/partner of Azure IoT Engineering at Microsoft, has joined the board of directors at the LoRa Alliance. The LoRa Alliance said the appointment will “strengthen the technology’s presence in the LPWAN market”. Donna Moore, chief executive and chairwoman at the LoRa Alliance, commented: “Tony’s insight and guidance will strengthen and accelerate LoRaWAN end-to-end solutions and zero-touch deployments.”
Shakib said: “Microsoft has invested billions of dollars to enable customers to build digital twins of the physical world [enabling] customers to analyze, predict and control environments across industries, whether monitoring production lines, managing worker safety, optimizing supply chains or delighting retail customers. A critical link in these digital transformations is the connectivity fabric, and LoRaWAN has unique capabilities to help fulfill that vision..”
Microsoft listed work with alliance members including Beyond Eyes, a subsidiary of Dutch construction-services firm Heijmans, which installed 20,000 LoRaWAN building sensors on a private LoRaWAN setup from Actility for Heijmans clients in the Netherlands, as well as Comcast-owned MachineQ, which offers outdoor tracking with CoreKinnect for 325,000 LoRaWAN devices on “a few hundred” MachineQ gateways at 80-odd sites in the US and Canada.
It also noted work with Microshare EverSmart to deliver around 20 Azure/LoRaWAN based IoT service solutions for ‘smart spaces’ to global customers in corporate offices, manufacturing and healthcare, and with French facilities management company Sodexo on LoRaWAN-based sensors for people counting, electric submetering, temperature monitoring, asset condition monitoring, air quality monitoring, asset tracking and many other sensor solutions.
There was also reference to Azure-and-LoRaWAN deployments by industrial IoT and AI company Webee, around a no-code ‘solution builder’ for LoRa and LoRaWAN devices in the framing industry, and with Netherlands-based The Things Industries, which is providing customers with the tools to build private LoRaWAN networks in smart buildings, smart agriculture, and foodtech; real estate company Morgan Sindall was named as a client.
