Actility, the industry leader in low power wide area networking, and the National Narrowband Network Co, Australia’s leading LORaWAN network operator, today signed a contract to partner in deploying a national LORaWAN network to catalyse the growth of industrial IoT across Australia. The agreement marks the successful completion of a testing and proof of concept phase, which has demonstrated that NNNCo and Actility can deliver together the key functionality required by customers, including NNNCo’s innovative granular multicast technology, which is today unique in the LPWA domain.

“This agreement is a key step in NNNCo’s commercial network development as we move from a testing phase to commercial roll out of the national narrowband network (NNN). This will occur project-by-project across Australia, in partnership with Actility as NNNCo’s network server provider, “ explains NNNCo Founder and CEO Rob Zagarella. “The big use cases in Australia are water, agriculture, energy monitoring and control, soil moisture, rainfall detection, cattle tracking, building management and people movement. Given Australia’s size and climate, we’ve also had to design in various architectures and gateway solutions to handle many different types of topographies and densities, from built-up urban centres to rural landscapes,” he adds.

“We’re delighted that NNNCo has chosen Actility to support this large-scale network that will enable a wide range of applications across Australia,” says Actility Founder and CTO Olivier Hersent. “Our extensive experience of carrier-grade network solutions, gained through powering almost half the national LPWA networks around the world, will help us support NNNCo through the unique challenges of what is, after all, a continental roll-out as well as a national one. But we have also been very impressed by the innovation we’ve seen from NNNCo in the course of our pilot programme together, and we believe that will be a powerful contribution to the worldwide LoRaWAN ecosystem.”

NNNCo is Australia’s LoRaWAN network operator, dedicated to building and operating a National Narrowband Network for IoT as an end-to-end scalable service offering over a shared network. The company is working with some of the world’s leading energy and water utilities, technology providers and innovators to roll out large-scale, carrier-grade network solutions. Over the past 12 months, NNNCO has become established as a world-leading organisation in understanding the scope, and the limits, of LoRaWAN solutions. The company’s approach has been to focus on a number of key verticals that it believes will have the biggest impact, such as energy, water and smart cities, and it has gone in deep on those verticals with end-to-end solutions.

The new contract comes as the joint NNNCo/Actility trial deployment with Ergon Energy reaches a key milestone, ready to evolve towards a full-scale commercial solution. The testing/PoC stage has been geared towards preparing for the deployment of large-scale network roll-outs that can handle the challenges. NNNCo is now in the final stage of the Ergon Energy proof of concept, which includes 50 production-ready DREDS (Demand Response Enabling Devices).

“We know the network works and we’re on the border between proof of concept and commercial deployments,” explains Zagarella. ”We’re preparing ourselves to access Actility’s network server for commercial roll-out. It’s exciting to be working with a global partner like Actility which is providing network servers to other large operators around the world. Throughout our PoCs NNNCo has had a great working relationship with Actility from a development perspective, to ensure we’re prepared for the commercial deployments such as smart cities, utilities, water and agriculture.”

“This contract is a clear demonstration of how the momentum behind LoRaWAN is building quickly in the Asia-Pacific region,” comments Actility’s Peter Hogewoning, Director of Sales for APAC. “With LoRaWAN already well established in Europe, ground-breaking national and large-scale network roll-outs all around the Pacific Basin are going to be a highlight for the LPWA ecosystem in 2017.”