Interested in connecting with Alistair? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Semtech: Semtech's LoRa devices and the open LoRaWAN® standard offers an efficient, flexible and economical solution to real-world problems in rural and indoor use cases, where cellular and Wi-Fi/BLE based networks are ineffective. Learn why LoRaWAN is becoming a leading standard of low power wide area networks (LPWAN)

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(00:54) Intro to Alistair Fulton

(01:39) Intro to Semtech

(03:29) Use Cases for LoRa and Semtech’s Offerings

(11:45) How has the pandemic changed the smart hospital landscape? Where is it going?

(14:55) When referring to LoRa versus LoRaWAN, what’s the difference there?

(20:15) How can companies use IoT to promote sustainability?

(23:29) How can IoT technologies help us prepare and recover from natural disasters?

(26:33) How can LoRa work alongside satellites to provide connectivity?

(29:07) What does the future of LoRa look like?

Transcript:

- [Narrator] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast on the IoT For All Media Network. I'm your host Ryan Chacon one of the Co-Creators of IoT For All. Now, before we jump into this episode, please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or join our newsletter at iotforall.com/newsletter, to catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out. Before we get started, if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market, but don't know where to start, check out our sponsor, Leverege's IoT solutions development platform, which provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com. That's iotchangeseverything.com. So, without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome Alistair to the IoT For All show, thanks for being here this week.

- [Alistair] Hi Ryan, you're welcome, good to be here.

- [Ryan] Can you start off just by quickly introducing yourself to our audience? Maybe a little background information, anything you think would be relevant to give our audience some context, who they're listening to?

- [Alistair] Yeah, sure. I'm the general manager of the Semtech wireless and sensing business, which is responsible for a technology called LoRa and beginning of LoRaWAN. My background; I've been in IoT for probably the last 30 years or so. Way back before it was called the IoT, when it was still called M2M telematics. Like most, I started in cellular, but spent a number of years working with Microsoft on the Azure IoT platform, and then spent a few years building Hitachi's Lumada industrial IoT platform before joining Semtech three years ago.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Talk a little bit more about Semtech and kind of what you all do. LoRa's obviously very well known in the industry from a connectivity option. And you know, when people hear LoRa, LoRaWAN, what does that mean? Kind of, what does it do? How does it operate? You know, and what of the benefits of it?

- [Alistair] Well, LoRa is really quite a unique technology that provides for low bandwidth, long range, and low power communication using the industrial and medical band. So free spectrum. It specifically was originally developed for utilities, for things like automated, remote meter reading, but over the course of the last few years, we've seen that use expand exponentially across pretty much every single use case you could think of in the IoT. Semtech's role is we provide semiconductors, which might lead you to think, well, what's a platform or a software person like me doing in a semiconductor company? And the answer is quite simple. IoT has long lacked, easy means of connecting everything. A lot of the use cases I've certainly worked on over the years have really required a very ubiquitous dataset that is either extraordinarily expensive to generate using more professional methods or just very difficult to implement. You know, wired solutions, et cetera. So LoRa really fills a gap that's been around for a good long while for applications that require the connection of, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sensors, all feeding data into a centralized system. And as such, it lends itself particularly to use cases that involve large, complex distribution systems or production systems like agriculture and so on.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Let's expand a little bit on the use case side there and kind of bring this full circle for our audience and talk about how LoRa and other offerings you have in the market are kind of being used in everyday life. So, if there are any kind of just prominent or more applicable use cases, you're comfortable sharing to our audience that'd be fantastic.

- [Alistair] Oh gosh. I mean, I always say to my team that barely, there goes a day goes by where I don't find a new-- Something else it's being used for.

- [Ryan] Right, right.

- [Alistair] So, that's really part of you know, our approach is we provide the underlying radio. We have a league--

- [Ryan] Mm hmm.

- [Alistair] That we're members of called the LoRa Alliance, which is 400 plus members, doing everything you can imagine. I mean, as I said, originally, LoRa was really developed to support some quite challenging use cases and utilities. Being able to penetrate the ground to, you know, a meter that was 10 meters below concrete. And obviously utilities still remains a really quite significant use case. Both metering, but also increasingly grid management. Electricity grids, certainly in the U S, where both of us reside are a source of very significant challenges, both in terms of power cuts, but also, at least in the US West, where I live, causing wildfires, et cetera. So, LoRa, quite extensively used to monitor equipment throughout a grid. But beyond that, we see LoRa, particularly at the moment, a very significant uptick in use of LoRa in the logistics space. Again, as I was saying earlier, you know, really complex systems where you have 200,000 specialized pallets circulating through an entire European wide distribution system. LoRa's used to track each and every one of those pallets so that the customers in that multi-party distribution chain know where everything is, specifically to prevent loss and theft, et cetera. On the agricultural side, as briefly mentioned, we see LoRa used to perform soil monitoring, monitoring the usage of agrochemicals, monitoring the quality of food products as they come from farm to table, monitoring origin, et cetera. But we also see LoRa used very extensively in smart cities, smart building type environments, where, either for monitoring energy consumption or actively managing energy consumption. You can optimize how you are consuming electricity, gas, et cetera, or even water, based upon the actual usage of buildings and how people are interacting in those built spaces. So, a lot of LoRa is really about deriving, as much of the IoT is actually, it's about deriving more from less, you know, getting more products from less input, increasing efficiency, and of course the natural consequence of that is reducing the environmental impact of many of the activities that we as humans are responsible for.

- [Ryan] Right. Now, would you, are there any use cases or applications that potential audience members may be kind of thinking about that LoRa wouldn't be a good fit for? I know it's kind of a loaded question, but, kind of anything you would advise, like, if this is kind of the parameters or the characteristics of your use case, LoRa's probably not the best fit, but just to, kind of, get a sense of where the lines are?

- [Alistair] Yeah. It's primarily high bandwidth, and with high bandwidth comes high power demand. So typically, security video cameras, et cetera. But, that said, we do have customers who use LoRa to send heavily condensed video signal, but for things that really require either real time, near real time, or higher bandwidth connections, LoRa's not a great fit, I think in most IoT solutions though, there are rarely, rarely solutions which use one technology. And so one of the things that follows a design principle really is LoRa is part of a toolkit and our job is to deliver tools to our customers that are interoperable and easy to use. So we customers use LoRa in combination with 5G, with 4G, with wifi, with Bluetooth, pretty much every other connectivity technology, you could imagine. And that's the way that things should be. I think, you know, the IoT has long suffered from people taking a bit more of a proprietary kind of closed walled garden approach in the past. You know, at least in my experiences, both customer and solution provider is rarely the right answer from the customer's perspective. So, we aim to be compatible, but we know what we're good at, and that's low bandwidth, long range, ultra low power, low cost connectivity, and we know what we're not good at, and that's high bandwidth. And we aim to be compatible with all the other solutions in this space that support some of those other requirements.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. And throughout the pandemic, I'm curious, have you all discovered any new use cases that, you know, LoRa has been used for or could be applicable for just based on this kind of, you know, abnormal year, year and a half that we've had to go through?

- Yeah, it's quite an abnormal year and a half isn't it? It's gone in phases actually, to be honest, Ryan. And at the beginning, when we were, I think collectively, all in a bit of a blind panic about what was happening, we saw a lot of customers taking pre-existing LoRa solutions and applying them to this new problem. So, things like emergency panic buttons, originally developed for workers in the hotel and hospitality industries were taken and used to provide emergency call buttons for patients in field hospitals in Europe. Totally orthogonal use case, but absolutely the same problem; how do I quickly deploy a super low cost network solution that doesn't require that I plan a network. I can just install it and connect everything. We saw an increase in existing use cases like tracking assets. So tracking hospital equipment, crash cars, venting in particular. And an adaptation of asset monitoring solutions rather than monitoring, you know, slurry pumps, then monitor the performance of said respirators and other pieces of equipment. So, I think collectively, you know, the IoT ecosystem, just like everybody else, we looked at what we had in the cupboard that would help solve a--

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Alistair] And we applied it as quickly as possible. What we've seen now, as we kind of move, hopefully, I was hesitate when I say this, but hopefully, towards a slightly more normal situation. We're seeing quite extensive use of LoRa and LoRaWAN based solutions to connect buildings. We use this in our own building. So, monitoring presence either from a static presence sensor, is there someone in the room or actually in some of our facilities with tags that can monitor proximity. So, if Alistair's stood next to Bryan for too long, we have a record of that. But CO2 monitors, monitoring the performance of our air blowers, as well as moving toward touch-less interaction with, you know, bathroom--

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Alistair] Et cetera. So, and that I think is more of a, an evolution of the sorts of solutions we saw in smart building that is, and that evolution is specific to the challenge created by COVID. It's not so much a reuse of what's in the cupboard. It's actually the ecosystem having a bit of time to really try and figure out, okay, well, how do we solve this problem? Because if people are gonna go back into the built environment, then we're gonna need to have some more confidence about whether that environments clean and is the air circulating effectively, et cetera. And I think that's probably a much more sustained set of use cases that are honestly, I think, it just gonna be part of the way that we live our lives, now.

- [Ryan] Yeah, I totally agree with you. We've heard very similar stories from a lot of other companies we've spoken to on the podcast, just about how pandemic has, has influenced their business, how, you know, they've gotten more involved in the healthcare space and they thought they were before, because exactly what you're saying, is people are looking for things that were already created, how can we adapt them to these new challenges that we're seeing? I'm curious to hear your take on how you see the smart hospital landscape kind of shifting or how it has shift, I guess, shifted over the last year or so and where you kind of see it heading? You know, we're seeing more people starting the transition to be leaving hospitals, you know, tend to be able to be monitored remotely. So, I'm just curious your take on how you view the smart hospital landscape in general?

- [Alistair] I think that's a super interesting space. And as I said, you know, I've been in this space for a good 30 odd years at this point. And I think throughout that 30 years, not a year has gone by where I've not looked at some kind of smart health application. I think the appetite has changed. I think earlier, you know, a couple of decades ago, there was a lot of trepidation around data privacy, et cetera. And that still remains, but I would separate the two though. I would separate the hospital as a building and a healthcare system, because I think the two are quite distinct. We see use cases in the hospital as a building, which are just the same as you would see in any other smart building. Am I utilizing my energy resources in a responsible way? Do I know where my assets are? Certain instances, do I know where my workers are and are they safe? And we see all of those use cases within the hospital environment. You touch on this, though. The health care system is something different. And I think what I'm seeing in these last few years, is as populations age, the health outcomes of patients who stay in their own homes for longer period of time are significantly better than the health patients who are in institutional settings, particularly for memory care patients. Alzheimer's and so on. And then what we're seeing and LoRa is being used in these types of applications, as well as other technologies. What we're seeing is the development of solutions, which enable both the remote monitoring of patients. So, is grandma moving around in her apartment?

- [Ryan] Right, right, right.

- [Alistair] But they're also self use products, which I think is particularly exciting. So, the ability to wear a sensor that can provide real time feedback on the health condition that you may suffer from, whether it's arrhythmia or respiration issues, or indeed some of the follow on issues that the patients with so-called with long COVID or long lasting COVID symptoms, are experiencing. And I think that the most interesting thing, as I said, is it's the use of technologies like LoRa, IoT technologies in that health care system that I think has the greatest promise in terms of improving the quality of all of our lives, honestly.

- [Ryan] Yeah, I totally agree with you. That's kind of fantastic insights and a very, you know, the smart hospital, the smart healthcare space is a very unique one, a very kind of exciting one just to see what transformations are gonna be happening, because I think there's a renewed focus on it ever since the pandemic and IoT is such an exciting industry already, let alone kind of adding this layer on top of it. So, I totally agree with you. I wanted to ask you just kind of a unrelated question, real quick, is when people say LoRa versus LoRaWAN, what is the difference? And kind of just, because I know it's sometimes used interchangeably, but I think our audience would benefit from just understanding why there is a difference at times?

- [Alistair] Yes. LoRa is the radio. So, its the physical bit. And LoRaWAN is the protocol. And the reason that the distinction, well, obviously the distinction is important because one is one thing and one is the other. The way that Semtech has approached this space really, is, so on the radio side, having this essentially the same radio in every single LoRaWAN based device means that you have marginality at the hardware layer, which makes the job much, much easier. LoRaWAN, the protocol, we recognized at the very outset of this journey that, a semiconductor company was not going to come up with all of the different capabilities and requirements for an effective, low power protocol. So we, along with several others very quickly formed the LoRa Alliance to drive the definition of that protocol based on the experience and understanding of, at this point, 400 plus companies. And so the protocol has evolved really rapidly, driven by market need. And we've kind of focused this provider on providing the radio. Now, downside of that model would be single source provision. And so, we've also acted in parallel to license our IP, to partners like SD micro, for example, because, you know, we recognize the diversity of supply is key, diversity of choice. And by the same measure, you know, there are many other folks in our space who have ideas that we won't have about how to evolve the solutions. And if we act to prevent customers having access to that, then we're not doing right by the customer at the end of the day. So, and I do think that that's somewhat of a differentiated approach. Again, I'm somewhat looking into the semiconductor industry from the outside. I don't know that people have always started with interoperability and openness as a design principle in the way that we have. I think it's very important.

- [Ryan] Oh, I totally agree with you. I mean, just seeing over the last, I haven't been in the space nearly as long as you have, but I've been in it, whoo, almost five years now. And, you know, when I first got into this space, when you hear, LoRa was already becoming a popular name thrown out and connected to obviously, Semtech, but just seeing what LoRa's enabled in the space with that openness and the LoRa Alliance's growth and all those things kind of attached to it has been fantastic for the industry. Something that I think a lot of other companies and connectivity options could learn a lot from. So, it's been fantastic to see.

- [Alistair] But it's striking the right balance between, maintaining homogeneity so that the developer's life is easier with insuring choice, and honestly, avoiding, helping customers avoid lock-in because, you know, lock-in is not good for customers. There're several companies, a couple of whom I've worked for, who've shown customers why not a good thing. I think for IoT to flourish, there's got to be an openness. There's got to be flexibility. There's got to be ease of use. And, honestly, one of the opportunities I think that Semtech has is, we're able to support that, we're able to provide on this product that it can be open at the same time.

- [Ryan] Yeah. it's always interesting, kinda, when I have this conversation with people, just to think about how we view adoption and what we feel like is required for adoption to increase across any number of industries. And, you know, there's tons of connectivity options out there that oftentimes confuses people and sometimes deters people from adopting IoT. But in reality, all these connectivity options are more opportunities to find the right package of components to build a solution that fits their use case perfectly, gives them the ROI they're looking for and so forth. So, the more that something like LoRa can work and be interoperable with other technologies and provide the opportunity for more, for IoT to be more easily adopted, more easily understood, and to see success, only helps anyone that's involved, right? It's not pushing against anyone else. It's only contributing to the good of the industry and, you know, helping us try to reach those projections that these analysts have promised us for so many years, now.

- [Alistair] I agree with you. It turns out shockingly, that customers, like simplicity. They like a quick return.

- [Ryan] Who woulda known? Who woulda known?

- [Alistair] And I do think in this space, that's kind of quite, you know, we have all engineers to one degree or another. It's very easy to get lost in the, you know, the fantastic technology that we--

- [Ryan] Of course.

- [Alistair] And forget that, that simple and quick is, and cost-effective, always wins. And, you know, that's what we really focus on from a design point of view. We want to make the products simple.

- [Ryan] Of course.

- [Alistair] Deep embedded development skills to be able to pick up a LoRaWAN based device and do something with it. You should be able to work with that device as a cloud developer, or a mobile application developer.

- [Ryan] Yeah. It increases the value of that technology, the more flexible it could be. So, I totally agree with you. I wanted to shift conversation quickly, for a second, and talk about sustainability because it's a conversation that comes up from time to time. But from your perspective, how do you kind of view companies or how can companies kind of turn to the Internet of Things to promote sustainability and kind of, the role that it can play in success, there?

- [Alistair] Well, it's funny, and I've said this before, but now, I genuinely think that the IoT is the technology, world's way of putting its best foot forward to solve some of the major issues that we face as humanity. We, through our genius have come up with myriad ways to produce food and energy, and the consequences of that genius are visible around us. We're in a position, now, where we're seeing unprecedented levels of warming, unless you go back to the PSTN era, we've got a serious problem to solve. And I think IoT plays a critical part in that. I think, one of the ways it does that is that it helps align economic, the economics of the world with the environmental challenges that we face. And I say that because of the following, if I have perfect information on a distribution system, and I am economically motivated to optimize that system and to reduce waste. The direct by-product of reducing wastage is lessen environmental impact. And that's true, whether it's in the food production system, which is probably the most complex global supply chain model that you see. Whether it's car parts or pretty much anything else. More from less. And IoT plays a critical part in delivering on that. But to do so, it has to be accessible. It has to be easy. It has to be cheap. It has to be. And, you know, we talked about some of the other technologies that higher bandwidth technologies earlier. They're great. And again, I, like many folks in this space, come from a cellular background, you can't beat 5G for a high bandwidth connection that's gonna get you vast amounts of data, but you can't deploy a 5G radio on a smoke sensor that you drop every 50 meters throughout a fire zone. It just doesn't work. So, but I think IoT is a critical part of the jigsaw in solving some of our sustainability issues, but it's because it ties into the economic drivers or the other incentives, the commercial enterprises. I was gonna say earlier, actually, in the context of smart hospitals, the same is true. We can build all the technologies that you need to actually deliver on that vision of patients living in home or for more of their lives, but until align the economic incentives to that. And it varies globally, but in the US, the economic incentive for hospital is to see inpatients. People walk in or they get paid.

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Alistair] I think in the broader environmental context, those economic incentives already exist and they're already aligned. What's been missing is the technology to give companies the data to act on those economic incentives.

- [Ryan] That makes total sense. I completely agree with you. So, I wanted to ask, kind of, it's not necessarily, it didn't directly connect to sustainability, but it talks, it's more about the time of year right now. Obviously, we're getting into kind of hurricane season. My sister actually lives down in Key West. So, she's been involved in some pretty big hurricanes over the years, and we were, I visited her last week and she was asking more about kind of what I do, what is IoT, et cetera. And I was kind of giving her some high level thoughts about how IoT kind of plays into natural disasters, how it could potentially play into, you know, hurricane season down here. And I wanted to get your thoughts on how you all, from your perspective, or just from your experience, either one, how IoT technology can help with disaster preparedness, how it can, kind of just help when these situations unfortunately occur, how we can better, not just prepare ourselves, but also better recover from them?

- [Alistair] Yeah. And I think that's a very sensible distinction actually, between those two, how can we better anticipate, you know?

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Alistair] And how can we recover more effective? 'Cause they are quite different scenarios. Now, the application of IoT technologies in anticipating disaster, is probably a little bit clearer. So, the use of sensors to determine changing weather conditions. Several years ago, I worked on very similar use case in Indonesia, looking at the how to anticipate the onset of tropical storms. And so sensor networks, which allow you to monitor sea level change, to see the waves coming in, in the front of the storm, weather sensors, et cetera. That gives you more data to anticipate what's gonna happen. However, the problem is that period of anticipation is very short. You've only got in some cases, minutes before the thing you're trying to forecast, actually hits you. Very true in the case of the . The second part, which is, I think is, maybe where that data can be used to greater effect, is in planning response, whether it's the deployment of emergency equipment based upon historical pattern and the application of current data to that pattern, to identify, this is where the hurricane is likely gonna hit, whether it's anticipating impact on electricity grids. As we talked about earlier, electricity grids are a prime source of wildfire. And one of the key dangers after wind events is wildfire exacerbated by breakage of gas lines, et cetera. And so being able to module based on real time data, the impact of the storm event on a grid allows the grid operator to shut down parts of