Orange announced the launch of its network to the Internet of Things – 01net

With its new concept of Smart Store launched last week on the Champs-Elysées, Orange has chosen to highlight the connected objects. The operator drives the point today announcing LoRa use the technology (Long Range) to deploy a network dedicated to the Internet of Things, M2M (Machine to Machine for). It will gradually be opened from the first quarter 2016 and will use free frequency bands that do not need to ask permission to Arcep.

The operator thus follows in the footsteps of its competitor Bouygues Telecom joined the consortium LoRa few months ago and plans to cover 500 cities by the end of the year. Like him, he has previously performed experiments in the city of Grenoble, where is based startups Cycleo who developed the technology.

This is primarily for Orange to offer new business services primarily targeting smart cities that are fitted with sensors. But the real implications will be for the general public who use the home Orange business customers services. “Smoke detectors, electric shutters, on / off control, LoRa could be used daily to replace the term Bluetooth” , explains Arnaud Vamparys, head of Mobile Networks at Orange.

A low-speed and long-range techno

LoRa is LPWA technology (Low Power Wide Area), that is to say low speed and long-range, which limits the power consumption and the cost of communications. She poses as a rival to that of SigFox, another French company to success, but also, for example, the start-up Angevin Qowisio.

It should be said that the greatest anarchy in this regard in the absence of standardization and that many consortia compete, whether the Open Interconnect Consortium with Intel and Samsung or Microsoft who joined Allseen Alliance. Meanwhile, LoRa Orange had the advantage of not being a proprietary, closed technology.

The operator will, however, diversify the solutions are also based on cellular networks. “We expect standardization in 2017 of future cellular networks 2G / 4G Internet of Things. But we will continue to use LoRa complement “, concludes Arnaud Vamparys. The idea will be to choose the network according to the specific needs of the connected object.

“The development of the Internet of Things looks like a blade bottom in the coming years. It is estimated that there will be over 25 billion devices connected worldwide in 2020 “, Stéphane Richard said yesterday in a session live tweets with Internet users.