Battle of the Networks
Battle of the Networks
There are a number of existing wireless technologies competing in the device monitoring space.
These include: cellular radios, unlicensed wireless mesh radios and narrowband radios, to name a few. While these are all reputable technologies with a strong track record in many application spaces, they are not the right selection for the IoT class of devices.
Old School Limitations
These technologies were originally designed for applications that are significantly distinct from the needs of device networking. They have considerable limitations in scaling to millions of devices—much less tens of billions—on a widely distributed wireless network with numerous hard-to reach locations.
Cellular technology is evolving in the opposite direction of what is needed for device networking. Consumers are clamoring (and paying) for costly endpoints, such as smart phones and tablets, video and other high-bandwidth applications. This is driving the cellular industry toward high-bandwidth, high-cost, and power-intensive wireless communication technologies.
Growing Pains
Wireless meshing has also become a popular technique to extend the limited range of short-range radios that have limited link budget. When deployments are dense and in favorable RF environments, such as a suburban neighborhood, meshing can create reasonable depth of coverage. However, when deployments are less densely or evenly deployed, or in unfavorable RF environments such as urban areas, the mesh architecture fractures into many clusters, requiring extensive amounts of additional infrastructure to ensure reliable connectivity. Additionally, mesh technology is a complicated system with substantial challenges in reliability when it is most needed, such as in a power outage for a utility application.
Narrow Focus
Narrowband radios transmit and receive digital or analog data over a very narrow bandwidth in the licensed or unlicensed RF spectrum. Licensed systems are limited to specific geographic regions and are often expensive in comparison to unlicensed systems. In order to achieve long range connectivity, these narrowband systems typically have very low system-level capacities. This makes them unsuitable for wide-area networks designed to serve millions of devices with more frequent data readings (for example five- or 15-minute sensor readings, versus daily readings).
RPMA Makes the Grade
In comparison, Ingenu’s RPMA technology uses a unique approach to provide the combination of extreme range for broad and deep coverage, a robust, secure, two-way link with sufficient throughput for more demanding sensor applications and the low cost and low power consumption required by many applications.