Smart Farm

Google Cloud has followed hyperscale mega-rivals Microsoft and AWS into the private 5G market with a bunch of specialist vendor and channel partners, starting with Betacom, Boingo Wireless, Celona, Crown Castle, and Kajeet. It said it is offering “turn-key” private …

More operator-bashing this morning at a two-day Informa event in London (Private Networks in a 5G World, June 14 and 15); the opportunity to take cellular into enterprise premises is “fading away” from them, remarked Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst at …

This is a rehash (and extension, in the end) of a previous post, to an extent; but it distils the message from before, and says there are sure signs, at last, that the private cellular market, covering localised installations of …

Consolidation in the satellite IoT space, already, and again; Swiss satellite IoT operator Astrocast has agreed a deal to acquire busy Dutch industrial IoT scale-up Hiber. Astrocast, with a network of 12 nanosatellites as it stands, has a stated plan …

Time to set the record straight on cellular 5G and Wi-Fi 6/7, a panel of Industry 4.0 luminaries suggested at Private Networks Forum (PNF) a couple of weeks back; these technologies are not, and never will be, mutually exclusive, it …

Three technology partners, one private network and robot tractors: At a U.S. smart vineyard, these were the seeds of success for a precision agriculture use case. Intel, Federated Wireless and Blue White Robotics discussed the partnership and the particulars during …

John Deere’s precision agriculture strategy was developed more than 10 years ago, and as a testament to its belief that farming is just outdoor manufacturing, the company is using what it’s learned from this success to improve and optimize its …

Nokia is to integrate Microsoft’s Azure Arc cloud management platform into its MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) solution for mission-critical Industry 4.0 environments. The tie-up will afford customers buying private wireless and edge computing from Nokia a way to also manage …

Weird, and frustrating; Swedish vendor Ericsson has issued a press release, the day after Nordic rival Nokia, about a new working relationship with T-Mobile in the US on private 5G. It is the same press release, just with a different …

What to say about the state of the private 5G market – about the state of ‘things’, if you like, at the top-end of the IoT game? I was asked to speak for five minutes to introduce the latest Private …

France-based precision agriculture startup Sencrop has raised $18 million in Series B funding, led by Israeli venture capital firm JVP. Sencrop, founded in 2016, headquartered in Lille, claims to be Europe’s leading provider of “field-connected solutions”, with 20,000 farmers in …

Thanks to John Deere, this stoop-dwelling, turnstile-hopping New York City kid got to ride in her first tractor! Fortunately for everyone, I didn’t have to drive it. That’s because, with just a swipe on a smartphone app, the tractor takes …

India is to say ‘no’ to direct spectrum allocations to enterprises for private 5G and Industry 4.0, as provisioned in most other major industrial markets, according to reports. Instead, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has recommended that leases …

Blue White Robotics, Federated Wireless, and Intel have announced work to adapt and connect existing farm equipment, notably tractors, at a California winery into autonomous production vehicles. The trio said the test project, which includes a private 4G/5G installation in …

Note, this article is continued from a previous entry, under the title, The big 5G problem – not networks, not spectrum, but devices (Talking 5G Blues). Asimakis Kokkos, chair of the technical specification working group at MFA, interviewed below, appears …

NNNCo. said that the LoRaWAN was funded as part of the Victorian Government’s On-Farm Internet of Things (IoT) trial   Australian IoT operator NNNCo has deployed a new network spread across 32,000 square kilometers in Victoria to help local farmers …

UK-based Wyld Networks has launched a range of sensor-to-satellite LoRaWAN devices for IoT applications where there is little or no terrestrial connectivity. The new hybrid terrestrial and satellite IoT devices, marketed under the Wyld Connect name, transfer data directly to …

Agricultural tech provider Solinftec is working with agricultural cooperative GROWMARK in the US to deploy and develop its new automated field robot during the 2022 farming season, “from planting to harvesting”. Solinftec, headquartered in São Paulo in Brazil and also …

Nokia said its radios are being used in 5G OI Lab’s field labs to test a variety of applications and use cases for rural farms Nokia announced that it has joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab (5G OI Lab) as …

Vodafone Business takes on precision agriculture Vodafone Business announced that it piloting a new service that could accelerate the digitization of farming across Europe by providing farmers with a mobile app linked to agricultural IoT sensors. Five European pilot farms …

UK-based (Sweden-owned) IoT connectivity specialist Wyld Networks and US-based IoT solution provider TrakAssure have announced the first fruit of their joint labour, also with LoRaWAN system provider Senet and satellite operator Eutelsat, to deliver a “first-to-market” terrestrial-and-satellite IoT solution for …

Last update from us on the Sigfox “soap opera” (someone else’s words), almost / perhaps, before the credits roll at the end of next week on its latest tangled episode (or the whole tragic series) – and as Enterprise IoT …

The global value of the cellular IoT market will almost double to $61 billion by 2026, from $31 billion in 2022, according to Juniper Research. The growth will be driven by high-end 5G and, in particular, low-end NB-IoT and LTE-M, …

Singapore-headquartered terrestrial IoT provider UnaBiz has struck a deal with Kinéis, a France-based satellite IoT spin-off from the French Space Agency (CNES), with a view to provide satellite IoT connectivity for the logistics and transportation industries. Kinéis was created in …

Note, in the week following publication of this article, Sigfox filed for bankruptcy. Coverage of receivership procedings against Sigfox can be found here; read on to hear about the kind of big ideas that, perhaps, undermined Sigfox in the end …