For the past eight months, Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company KPN has been rolling out the LoRa network nationwide, starting in Rotterdam and The Hague in November.
A LoRa network is a crucial tool in connecting objects to the Internet.
Netherlands gets first nationwide 'Internet of Things': The Hague, Dutch telecoms group KPN said Thursday tha… July 1, 2016
“From today the KPN LoRa network is available throughout The Netherlands,” KPN said. “This makes The Netherlands the first country in the world to have a nationwide LoRa network for Internet of Things (IoT) application.”
KPN is currently carrying out the LoRa experiment at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, one of the busiest air terminals in Europe, for baggage handling and is set to conduct tests to enable the network to monitor rail switches at the Utrecht rail station.
Devices are also being attached to the depth sounders at the port of Rotterdam to connect them to the IoT network.
“We observed the last year an increasing demand for low-power networking for the Internet-of-Things applications. By choosing Lora we respond to this, so that millions of devices can be cost-effectively connected to the Internet,” said Joost Farwerck, KPN chief operations officer.
“In less than a year, KPN in the Netherlands carried out a network that enables us to meet this market need.”
The company has hundreds of cell sites installed across the Netherlands and the LoRa system, which allows devices to be connected without the help of the traditional sim-card, will complement its networks for the 2G, 3G and 4G phones.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that the IoT spending will grow to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019 from $698.6 billion in 2015.
Last year, Asia-Pacific was the leader with more than 40 percent of the global IoT investment came from the region. North America and Western Europe were second and third with a combined spending of more than $250 billion.
“The Asia/Pacific region’s robust IoT spending outlook builds on three dynamics: developing countries’ technology investment needs are not fully met with traditional IT, which is allowing IoT investments to accelerate; government investments in infrastructure development and local business modernization, in China, India and the Philippines for example, are incorporating more and more IoT elements; and a burgeoning new consumer class is accelerating expenditures in goods and services, including those with IoT components,” said Marcus Torchia, IoT research manager at IDC.
