How we built it: Connecting cows with LPWAN technology | IoT Insider Podcast Episode 29

Bernie McPhillips
Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to the IoT Insider. I’m Bernie McPhillips, Sales Director at Pangea. And today I’m joined by Chris Romeika, our CTO and co founder. Hey, Chris, how you doing?

Chris Romeika
Hi, Bernie, how are you?

Bernie McPhillips
Really good thank you really good. Great to be on another podcast with you. I’ve always enjoyed it when we get the chance to do this. And today, we’re going to be looking at how we’ve helped a partner using LoRa and NB-IoT. I’m not sure there’s any other industry where there’s as many acronyms as ours. And today, we’re going to be looking at another. So LoRa, LPWAN, NB-IoT, lots more acronyms. So let’s start by kind of just discussing what that is. So LPWAN. That stands for Low Power Wide Area Network, I believe, Chris, I think that’s right?

Chris Romeika
Yep, that’s definitely right. I think most of the audience is probably familiar with what a Wide Area Network is. You’ve got Local Area Networks, Wide Area Networks, and now we’re throwing a Low Power Wide Area Network into the mix. All we’re really doing there, is just saying that we can connect devices over a wide range from a single antenna, using low power. So it’s kind of like you know, your AM or your shortwave radio, using low power, lower frequencies, but having greater coverage.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah it’s a much longer range, the signal can travel further. So obviously a big benefit. So LPWAN, what kind of technology is coming because LPWAN’s a bit of an umbrella, kind of acronym, isn’t it? I think it covers a lot of different technologies. So what kind of things come under it, then?

Chris Romeika
It is, yeah, there’s a few products that are floating around, some are more popular in countries than others. So for example, the main ones at the moment are probably a technology called Sigfox, which is a proprietary technology came out of France. And if you look at a Sigfox coverage map, France and the surrounding countries are kind of very well covered by Sigfox. Just like an actual mobile network. Sigfox has made inroads into other areas into other countries as well. There’s coverage in the UK, for example. Then on the other side of that we’ve got a technology called LoRa, and LoRaWAN, LoRa is kind of a more prevalent technology, I’d say around the world. Part of the reason for that is that because it’s actually an open standard. So you can get, you can get a partner to set up a LoRa service for you. Or you can actually go off the shelf and buy your own antenna and base station and devices and build your own Low Power Wide Area Network. So they’re the kind of the two technologies, which are out in the market at the moment. And we’ve got access to both of them.

Bernie McPhillips
Superb Chris, very articulate, and well explained. So you’re very technical, I’m obviously Sales Director here at Pangea, and I’m not particularly technical. So from my own understanding, and maybe some of our listeners, then you know, breaking this down into what it might mean, in the real world. We’re all very used to cellular devices, our own mobile phones, mobile data, being able to access things while we’re on the move. And probably already used to how that kind of that network operates. You’re within range of a cell site, you’ve got access to a particular SIM in your device, one of the UK network operators, for example, or maybe one of our Pangea, Multi-network services, and able to move across networks based on signal strength. So the difference between that, and what you’ve just described, then Low Power Wide Area Network, is that these services will typically be further reaching. So to access a standard cellular service, you’d have to be within a certain distance of a cell site. So you could be further away from a cell site and still get coverage Chris?

Chris Romeika
Yes, you can yeah. So talking more about LoRaWAN specifically, you’ll have one antenna. And you can go, you know, for example, six miles, ten kilometres, maybe a couple of miles less in a dense urban area, but you know, you’ve kind of got a long line of sight. So if you have a couple of antennas, and the technology is changing all the time, but you can have a couple of antennas set up and they will cover for example, a large park, or something like that, like let’s say maybe one antenna could cover Hyde Park or Regent’s Park in London and definitely beyond that. So, lower power, lower frequency, but more range and more penetration as well. So the penetration bit is quite interesting because that means that if you’ve got devices which are sort of three four floors down in a basement, you might have something like an earth or water sensor, or a drain sensor for sensing water levels and drains, it’s a few metres under the ground. You know, a typical 5G signal or 4G signal, is not probably going to penetrate that. Or it may be a bit iffy, a bit spotty, if it does. But with a LoRa type service, low power service, then you can still get that stable connectivity, which is one of the key reasons for deploying a LoRa, low power network.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, that’s what I was going to come on to, Chris, actually, as you were talking, I was really thinking about that the low power element. So we think of our own mobile devices, we carry them with us, we take them home, at the end of our working day, whatever it is that we’ve been doing, and we’ve got access to electricity, we can plug that device in, we can recharge it, and we’re ready to go again the next day. The thing with mobile devices, depending on usage, sometimes we’ve even got to power it partway through a day, you know if you’re a heavy user. So I suppose the benefit of low power networks, and the ability to connect in that way is that would negate the need to charge that device so regularly. Because these could be devices that are deployed in very remote locations. I’m thinking of things like smart metering, smart lighting, asset tracking, moving more into smart cities where everything’s going to be connected. And one of the things that we’re going to discuss today in one of our case studies is agriculture and kind of livestock monitoring. But it could be energy management, manufacturing, industrial IoT, these are devices that you can’t just plug them in and recharge them, it’d be logistically impossible for somebody to go out to these devices and visit them regularly enough to recharge them. So I’m thinking with low power, you can actually deploy these things, and they could be in the field for months, and even years, in some instances.

Chris Romeika
Yep we’ve seen devices, which can last up to 10 years. And obviously, it’s also about the size of the battery, as well. So that 10 year device, I just said, the one I had thinking in my head was one which uses those, they call it a coin battery, like the size of a one pound or two pound coin, those sort of tiny batteries. And you know, when we’re talking low power, when we’re talking LPWANs, these devices are actually specifically designed to be as efficient as possible, as small as possible. So it’s, you know, for your sensor case, efficient, and also, you know, rugged as possible as well, you know, they’re designed like as you were saying to be put somewhere and set and forget, you know, they turn on they start running, they might, you know, depending on what they need to do, they might wake up once or twice a day to send information about pollution levels, or water, moisture content in soil. Or they might wake up, you know, once every 10 minutes to send information about asset tracking, for example. So it’s all about the use case. And if you’re looking at a solution, it’s all about looking at the portfolio of what devices are out there and choosing the right one for your specific use case.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, that’s great, Chris and I think the language that you use in there, which I’m sure will resonate with the listeners like the device waking up. Because if it is a device that only needs to send a metre reading once a month, for a particular utility, for example, the rest of the time, the device is effectively sleeping and therefore not using power. And that was what also would enable that device to stay in the field for many years, and not need recharging at all. And that just brings us on to one of the things that I mentioned just a little bit earlier, and one of the case studies that we’ve got on our website around agriculture and livestock monitoring, it’s something that you’d never really consider when it comes to IoT, but with the Internet of Things we’re driving efficiencies, making people safer, saving money, increasing margins, and yield and that type of thing. It’s a very unusual, but actually a great case study that we’ve kind of detailed on our website. So we genuinely did get an email in, it was Dan our Managing Director, asking if we could connect cows and that’s kind of where it all started from. But if you think, what you’ve just been discussing there Chris we need to connect over vast distances, huge big parks, that type of thing. Farms, by their very nature, they cover many, many acres of land. So you’re going to be looking for a long range solution, the things that you’re looking to connect and the data that you’re looking to retrieve, it’s not necessarily a device that you would, you know, take back every day and recharge and redeploy. It will be deployed for long periods of time, months, or even years. So these are devices that were able to transmit very important information about livestock and in this instance, cows. So believe it or not, well it’s very believable. Cows are actually very expensive assets based on the breed, they can actually run into many thousands, tens of thousands of pounds per individual livestock. So the farmers want to be able to monitor that asset, its temperature, its wellbeing, its location, you can get alerts and geo fences if cows go beyond where they’re meant to be or get lost or in some cases even stolen due to their value. But you can actually then help to monitor the livestock and their well being. Their health, their temperature, making sure that they’re not getting ill. So you can then plan your grass fertilisation ahead of time, because you know where the cows like to spend their time. You can separate sick cows from healthy cows, and then basically just rest easy knowing that your assets are being well looked after. So yeah, I think there was lots of reasons why standard cellular connectivity, 3G, 4G, 5G probably just wasn’t going to cut it. Just the sheer size of the geography that needed to be covered, all these acres of farmland, the length of time that these devices would be deployed for and not charged every day. So we really went into, you know, looked at all the different kinds of protocols and the best way to to connect these devices, didn’t we?

Chris Romeika
Yes, we did. And, yeah, we came down to two options, really, you know, so one option was narrowband IoT, from past case studies or information on our website and maybe a podcast, narrowband IoT, it’s kind of your low power equivalent, or your, you know, your low bandwidth equivalent of a cellular network, in the same lines as LTE-M. So that’s more about the low power aspect of using the cellular network, optimising the cellular network, the existing towers, the existing infrastructure, to sort of have a low power deployment, which is wider range, but still offering, you know, cellular like technology. So there was an option to use narrowband IoT, and also LoRaWAN connectivity. So what we did is that we actually combined both of them into a single device. So basically, you know, the cows, or the customer who owned the cows had the option of using both solutions. That was particularly relevant in the area where the solution was deployed, because it was in an area of marginal reception. It was in a unique situation where, you know, there were no base stations of any network. So, you’d kind of get a bit of service here and there. However, if you had like a storm or some bad weather or the base station went down due to maintenance or something you’d lose the service. So we decided on a hybrid solution, putting up the customer’s own LoRaWAN masts in the area. Actually, only one mast is required to have a data transmission capability. But if you put in three masts, you start to get geolocation capabilities as well, because with three masts, and masts don’t cost a lot in LoRaWAN world. With three masks, you get to have triangulation, so you can actually start triangulating the cows like where they are. So that was an added benefit of using LoRaWAN. Without having to use something which consumes extra power, like a typical thing would be to have implemented a GPS module. But of course, anytime you implement something extra, it just requires more power more battery. So LoRaWAN had a great side benefit of being able to geo locate the cows in the various paddocks around the farm with just having three masts.

Bernie McPhillips
Superb Chris, while we’re talking about connecting these particular assets, and okay, these happen to be cows, this form of technology, we really believe that this is going to be critical when you bring it to life with things like smart cities. I think you’d be able to connect everything in a smart city like drains, and vehicles and lights and people and all of these assets and street furniture, when we move them forward into driverless cars, etc, it’s not going to be to connect all of those things in one particular protocol, so I doubt any single network would be able to connect all of those things and perform at its optimum. So you think of all the different ways they connect, whether it’s Wi-Fi, whether it’s any form of LPWAN, like you’ve mentioned, LTE-M, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN etc. I think it’s going to be all of those network protocols, all of these ways to connect, working together to be able to connect everything. And that’s because that’s what the Internet of Things is about, right? It’s just one big connected world and being able to connect, and everything kind of communicates with each other for really kind of simple synchronised processes and efficiencies. It’s not just going to be one form of connectivity suits all. I don’t think every one of our listeners and certainly a lot of our partners, they’re not all going to be falling over lots of opportunities to connect cows, but I think we’re just using that particular asset and okay, it’s quite an obscure one, but it kind of grabs people’s attention just to really demonstrate that anything is possible when it comes to IoT. Regardless of the asset, there is the device that can monitor its location, its temperature, pressure, vibration, geofencing to let you know if it moves away from a certain location, or doesn’t move, and it’s meant to, so regardless of what the asset is, and there’s value attached to it or a mega inconvenience if it’s misplaced or stolen or stopped working. That’s the future of IoT. And whether we’re going to be connecting using 4G and 5G, or whether it’s some form of low power form of connectivity, I think it’s all got a role to play. And it’ll be remiss of us not to talk about the sunset of a particular couple of protocols where there’s certainly a lot of talk in our industry about the PSTN switch off and the date looming in 2025. And it’s already well underway. Maybe not quite as prevalent in the press, and maybe not making quite as much noise right now is also the pending switch offs of 2G and 3G networks across the UK and beyond, as well. I think as networks evolve LTE, the very, the acronym, just another one, Long Term Evolution, that’s exactly what mobile networks are about, the ever evolving. I don’t think there’s ever going to become a point where someone switches off the mobile network, like it’s happening with PSTN, but they will continue to evolve. I think 2G 3G networks are now used a lot less as data applications are really hungry for bandwidth. 2G probably doesn’t cut it in an awful lot of instances. But it was quite long reaching, it was very reliable. And there’s a lot of devices connected to it, you think about smart metering and some asset tracking and payment terminals, there’s a lot of things out there that are 2G only, there are other devices that may be limited to 3G only. So there’s a lot of work to be done in the future, I would imagine, Chris in terms of the switch off of those particular network protocols, and then what to migrate to. So we’ve made a lot of noise in our channel, and certainly out to our listeners and our partners about the PSTN switch off and the fact that there’s lots of choices. It’s not just SOGEA, it’s not just fibre. There’s lots of intelligent mobile data opportunities in there as well. I suppose the same applies to 2G and 3G, whilst people might just think the natural kind of migration is to 4G and 5G and beyond, there’s got to be opportunities for these low power protocols as well right?

Chris Romeika
Yes, there is. Especially with 2G we’re kind of in a sense, with 2G and 3G, we’re kind of just missing out on something a little bit at the moment. So, you know, all the focus is on advanced versions of 4G and 5G. But if you think back to 2G, you know, you can kind of view it as sort of the old, reliable service in a sense, like a PSTN phone line. And, you know, sometimes you might make a phone call, and it might be on a 2G network, and it works when there’s one tiny little bar on your phone, stuff like that. And obviously, there’s solutions like LTE Cat-M1, and NB-IoT, which we mentioned earlier, but you know, it is important to be just aware of things beyond that, such as LPWAN. So, for example, let’s say you’re in a country where there’s a 2G sunset, you know, for example, Australia, that’s happening right now. And you’ve got a use case, it could be a fleet of dustbins in a shopping centre, car park. It could be a bunch of, you know, street lamps, it could be anything. You can look at it and say, Okay, actually, you know, I could wait for, you know, LTE Category M1 to come along and be deployed. Or that could be a couple of years away. So what you can do is go and look at the LPWAN solution, and see if there’s something there, you know, it’s always good to look into it. And of course, you know, Pangea, would be happy to discuss the requirements with you and figure out what the best solution is. Or back as in we did for the cows case study, we actually ended up with a hybrid solution, NB-IoT, and LoRaWAN, kind of future proofing the solution for the expected life, which in these in these cases, you know, when we talk about these deployments, you know, things like street lamps, street furniture, these deployments can last for five to 10 years. So it’s always worth having a good look at the technology available now to cover the requirements, and also what’s coming down the road.

Bernie McPhillips
Great stuff, Chris, I really liked the fact that you finished talking about the length that these devices can be deployed as well, because I’m always thinking with a, you know, kind of a sales head, as would be expected. And I imagine for our partners, while some of these opportunities might appear relatively obscure, they’re definitely out there and low power connectivity, I think is only really gonna grow as a marketplace as we move forward into a smarter world. Just being aware of its existence can often be enough and having in the back of your head that it’s an option. Then being able to get in touch with Pangea to support you through that opportunity. But the thing is some of the other markets that our partners are involved in, that might involve shorter contracts, there’s often a lot of regulation now around how long telecoms contracts can be, of course, there was having the ability to opt out and that type of thing. With IoT, one of the real benefits of it can often be the tenure of these contracts, the length of these deployments. So we’ve got contracts as long as 15 years, right, smart street lighting deals, that type of thing, 15 year contract. So for our partners to be able to deploy these services and know that they’re going to be out in the field for such a long time very long, guaranteed revenue streams. And with the volumes can often be quite vast as well, people don’t tend to deploy these low powered solutions. For one or two devices, there tends to be many, many hundreds, if not 1000s. And in some instances, even way beyond that. So there might be relatively low revenue per service. But the volume can be astronomical, and the length of time that these services will be deployed, go way beyond what could ever be expected with more traditional telecom services. People don’t typically deploy these things after two years and go looking for a new supplier, it is really about the quality of the service, the reliance of the low power, the range of the service, and just being the assurance of now when it’s out there, it’s doing what it’s meant to do. And there’s not really a need to kind of do anything about it for a long period of time. So just a different way for our partners to kind of think about these opportunities. And the length of time that can be deployed really long term and very assured revenue streams. Anything else in terms you can think of Chris, any other good examples, or anything our listeners and partners might want to be aware of when it comes to any form of low power connectivity?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of different use cases for LPWAN. So if you want to see some of those use cases, just check our website, blogs, case studies about it. And I think, yeah, the other part of it is, you know, just remember that it is something that you can, you know, one can deploy LoRaWAN solutions on their own. So, you know, it is possible to get services off the ground just by going online and buying your own thing, which is great if you’re technologically inclined, if you want a partner to work with you on that to sort of do the heavy lifting, do the assessment and help you construct the solution. And at the same time, make sure that solutions got a bit of life in it in terms of, you know, other cellular based technologies like NB-IoT and Cat M1, come talk to us, because we’ve got a lot of experience in the area, we’ve got access to a large portfolio of device makers. So you know, helping you to engineer the solution. That’s what we’re there for.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Chris, if any of our partners or listeners want a helping hand at getting started with their IoT project, all they need to do is get in touch with us via any medium, that’s just giving us a call 0800 470 4070. Make an inquiry through our website. If you’re an existing partner, get in touch with your account manager. We’re always here on hand, you know, to give any any pointers and support those projects. And on that note, yeah, head over to our website for more information on our podcast or blog content, as Chris said, real life examples about how IoT looks in action. We’ve got lots of case studies, get people registered on our hub, for our newsletter. We promise not to bombard you, but we publish lots of great content. So please do get in touch and stay connected to our content. And on that note, Chris, always a pleasure to do these podcasts with you. Always enjoyed it. Another one soon. Always a pleasure. So thanks for listening, everybody and look forward to presenting another podcast soon. Take care.