Orange is pursuing its IoT strategy with the planned rollout of a LoRa network in major French cities, a development kit for for start-ups and industrial partners to prototype connected objects and LoRa services, and enriching its Datavenue platform for IoT and data projects.
Announced in September, the planned LoRa network will be deployed gradually across France, starting with 17 cities in the first quarter of 2016. The cities concerned are Angers, Avignon, Bordeaux, Douai and Lens, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Nice, Paris, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Toulouse and Strasbourg. In parallel, Orange and Ericsson will perform the first trial IoT using EC-GSM technology over 2G and LTE networks by the end of the year.
Orange’s IoT connectivity kit for LoRa can be used already on networks the operator is trialing in Grenoble and at two sites in the Paris region.
Originally open to start-ups, the Datavenue service platform now targets companies across all sectors. It has been enriched with new services and now features two complementary offerings, Live Objects for connected objects and Flexible Data for data analysis. Live Objects enables businesses to select connected objects or sensors from a catalogue, choose the most suitable connectivity option, process and store data from objects, and integrate the relevant data into their information systems and view it. Flexible Data comprises data analysis applications enabling businesses to build data warehouses from multiple sources and perform predictive analysis, a private data sharing space when they can buy third-party data, a way get the most out of their own data, and a secure cloud infrastructure.
One of the goals of Orange’s Essentials2020 strategic plan is to achieve EUR 600 million of revenue in the IoT market by 2018. The company said it aims to be present across the whole value chain, to supply adapted connectivity solutions and to distribute connected objects via its store network.
