A Look at SoftBanks LoRa Rollout in Japan

On September 12, 2016, SoftBank Corp, one of the largest telcos in Japan, announced the nationwide rollout of LoRa network to address IoT.  The announcement also mentioned SoftBank’s partnership with Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn technology group,  LoRa network infrastructure, and IoT platform vendor Actility. 

SK telecom is deploying the LoRa network in South Korea and Tata Telecoms plans to build a nationwide network.  As suckSoftBank is the third telecom operator to announce its plans for a nationwide LoRa network rollout in the region. During this South Korea rollout, Samsung electronics joined SK telecom to deliver an ecosystem to drive end-device development that could leverage the network technology.  In Japan, SoftBank partnered with Actility, Semtech Corporation, and Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, one of the largest contract electronics OEMs, to create the ecosystem that would leverage the public network. SoftBank will also rollout cellular LPWA standards, LTE-M, and NB-IoT, but will target specific IoT applications. The announcement mentioned applications that could leverage the LoRa network, including smart metering for gas and water distribution, smart buildings, asset tracking, eldercare, intelligent transportation systems, fleet management, people tracking, and pet tracking.

The growth of non-cellular LPWA networks and its continued adoption from telcos reiterates the technology’s complimentary nature and its role as a strategic connectivity technology to address certain niche IoT use cases. The network will use unlicensed, public spectrum using the Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency band. The network technology can provide low-cost connectivity for smart devices across a wide geographical area. As public networks are deployed and gain acceptance, managed services from telcos and network operators are expected to witness significant growth and drive IoT use cases.  Robust ecosystems of OEMs and platform vendors  are important to highlight the network’s capabilities and to develop confidence among other OEMS on the technology’s technical feasibility.

Among the other applications, smart metering is an interesting application. According to IEA Japan depends on gas imports to meet 99.6% of domestic demand. This largely imports dependence for gas and energy security has been a growing concerns in the country after its decision to turn off its nuclear power plants. Smart meters are seen as a pivotal tool to efficiently manage energy resources and end-user demand. Over the years, Japan has been trialing a number of wireless connectivity technologies for smart meters including electricity, gas, and water meters.  Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd the largest gas utility along with other gas utilities in Japan have been trialing U-Bus and U-Bus Air that leverages the 802.15.4g/e specification for smart gas metering since 2012. While it is highly unlikely that the big utilities, such as Tokyo GAs and Osaka Gas, will discontinue with U-Bus technology and shift to LoRa network, there are over a dozen other smaller gas utilities that could adopt LPWA technology from SoftBank and other telcos offered as a managed service.

Smart water meters are projected to constitute a large portion of the end-point connections, and is most suitable for non-cellular LPWA technology, such as LoRa. Smart buildings, eldercare, asset tracking, people, and pet tracking are markets where LoRa network will witness adoption, especially in use cases where  a higher latency threshold or low-cost of services are prerequisites. In markets, such as intelligent transportation systems and fleet management, most applications require fast, high bandwidth networks  that are most suited for cellular standards.