Outside of the consumer market, real examples of the Internet of Things (IoT) often disappoint because in the end, they are limited by one or more of the IoT’s constraints: tens of billions of devices, cheap to acquire, cheap to deploy, security and ubiquitous connections.
I spoke with Dave Kjendal, Senet’s vice president of engineering and CTO, because he has built products and networks that meet these constraints. It was insightful because Senet has produced products using the entire IoT stack.
Senet’s evolution began in 2009 with low-cost fuel oil tank sensors communicating over the unlicensed airwaves to optimize delivery routes. The company now operates a general purpose LoRaWAN IoT network that covers one-fortieth of the United States. LoRaWAN is an implementation of low-power, wide-area networks designed to transmit small messages at a frequency of about one an hour. It serves about 55 percent of IoT WAN connectivity. It is a different technical approach than what the mobile carriers promise with 3GPP, which is yet to be standardized.
Looking back to the early 1900s at the dawn of nationwide telephone service, there were more than 2,500 telephone companies because the telephone business was an entrepreneurial business, impossible to centrally plan and execute. Entrepreneurs wired homes and business in local geographies and then were acquired and rolled up into a nationwide telephone network. The same thing happened in the early days of cable television and pagers.