Orange has announced plans to cover all of metropolitan France with a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network using LoRa (Long Range) technology as a supplement to its cellular infrastructure. The LoRa network will gradually open from the first quarter of 2016 to deliver guaranteed connectivity with a reduced energy consumption and lower costs. The operator is targeting both mass market and business customers. Orange tested the LoRa technology in a large scale trial in Grenoble involving more than 30 partners.
CEO Stephane Richard said the company aims to be the number one operator for the IoT, which is expected to include over 25 billion connected objects worldwide by 2020. He added, “Beyond connectivity, Orange is also involved in the distribution of connected objects, in the aggregation and data processing stemming from these objects as well as proposing value-added services in the field of health and well-being, the connected home and Smart Cities."
Orange’s Essentials2020 strategy calls for generating EUR 600 million of revenue from the IoT by 2018. Orange is also continuing the work on the standardisation of future cell networks (2G/4G) for the IoT, which will be operational in 2017, and for 5G by 2022.
