Actility has been playing a key role in driving the LoRaWAN® technology development from its creation, as a founding member, to the current days by driving and contributing to the development of its standard and ecosystem. By leading the development of the LoRaWAN® roaming standard, Actility became the first vendor ever to implement it and to successfully run interoperability tests with several other members of the LoRa Alliance.  LoRaWAN actility

The first international roaming trial took place between Orange in France and KPN in the Netherlands, two of Actility’s long-established public network operator customers using the company’s ThingPark platform, among other 50+ around the globe.

Following the peer-to-peer interconnection among operators, the next natural step for wireless communication technologies is to build peering hubs to ease interconnection. Hubs facilitate the “Connect once, peer with any other network” approach which provides scalable, secure, and manageable peering among the ever-increasing number of networks. Actility, with its mission to accelerate LoRaWAN® adoption by lowering barriers, has been operating the first LoRaWAN® peering hub since April 2019: ThingPark Exchange.

In just one year, ThingPark Exchange onboarded many LoRaWAN® networks: it already connects 18 networks which are a mix of public and private networks, network servers, and join servers, based on both Actility and non-Actility platforms, including two satellite networks. At the time of this publication, LoRaWAN® infrastructure connected to ThingPark Exchange includes multiple public networks: Digita in Finland, ER-Telecom in Russia, KPN in the Netherlands, Netzikon in Germany, Oresundskraft in Sweden, Orange in France and Romania, Proximus in Belgium, Swisscom in Switzerland, NNNCo in Australia, Everynet in the Americas, EMEA and Indonesia, a multi-country private network (Schneider Electric), two worldwide satellite IoT networks (Lacuna and Hiber), and two LoRaWAN Join Servers (Semtech Join Server and Actility’s ThingPark Activation).

Availability of the join servers also signifies that ThingPark Exchange is used for both “roaming” and “activation”, hence it is called a “peering hub”, not just a “roaming hub”. By adding the support of its ThingPark Activation Service on top of the ThingPark Exchange peering hub, Actility makes it easy for large device manufacturers to securely manufacture devices and roll them out across the globe without the hassle of sharing device credentials with each network individually. LoRaWAN actility

For solution providers, who need more than initial activation and also care about processing the data, the peering hub also solves the issue of diversity of commissioning and dataflow interfaces on each network. As LoRaWAN® uses an unlicensed spectrum, any LoRa Alliance member is allowed to register a “NetID” and own a home network and may collect all traffic, on any network, using the standard LoRaWAN Backend 1.x Interface. ThingPark Exchange enables solution providers to gain global connectivity with only one interface to their own home network server, solving the engineering headache often associated with large, multi-network deployments and integration. LoRaWAN actility

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