Multi-Technology: The Future of Geolocation
In the big world of IoT, location tracking is the next frontier! Location tracking for humans is already an integral part of our lives, especially for navigation. Traditional technologies enabling this are not only expensive; they also have technical boundaries that prevent successful scaling. For IoT geolocation to become a reality, it must be extremely accurate, very low and significantly low touch.
Research and Markets predict revenues from “Geo IoT” will reach $49 billion by 2021.
Research and Markets report in “Geo IoT Technologies, Services, and Applications Market Outlook” that just as location determination has become an essential element of personal communications, so shall presence detection and location-aware technologies be key to the long-term success of IoT. They add that Geo IoT will positively impact many industry verticals.
Connecting IoT objects is already a large market growing exponentially with the mix of unlicensed Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies such as LoRaWAN, and combined more recent introduction of Cellular IoT technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M. Adding Geolocation to this introduces a whole range of new applications not possible before. Some of these applications are:
The above applications represent a large existing market that can only be captured with extremely low cost and low power trackers.
Whether it’s railway cars, truck trailers, or containers, tracking valuable assets on the move is a pain point for many large, distributed organizations involved in logistics and supply chain management. These large organizations typically rely on partners such as distributors to register check-in and check-out events correctly.
The registration process at specific checkpoints is usually manual, intermittent, and subject to human error. To address this issue, an IoT low-power asset tracking system that leverages Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) trackers brings a “timeless” checkpoint solution. Specifically, LoRaWAN™-based trackers, due to their low power, low cost and lightweight, standardized infrastructure, provide the first truly reliable tracking solution that allows logistics operators to reduce downtime during transportation.
In the logistics sector, many business use cases suffer additional costs due to inefficient utilization of assets. Transport companies need to invest in freight railway cars; car logistics companies need to invest in truck trailers; and, of course, there are the standard containers and pallets.
However, measuring this downtime is also a challenge. Traditional solutions involved cellular or satellite trackers, which require significant CAPEX, but perhaps more importantly also ongoing OPEX due to battery replacements and connectivity costs. In some cases, trackers are located in hard-to-reach areas especially when mounted on railroad cars, or in oil and gas rigs, which make it very costly to replace batteries—especially if there are hundreds of thousands of trackers deployed in the field.
For now, at least, humans do battery replacement. It’s one of the dominating OPEX factors in the Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO) of the whole IoT solution.
