This week I have attended #TFD24 as a delegate, the first sponsor to present was Cisco leading with their IoT Solutions. Cisco demonstrated a wide range of IoT ready solutions including both data centre and rugged products for use in the field. During the presentation there was a full review of the IoT portfolio including switching, routing, embedded devices industrial WiFi and their full stack service Industrial Asset vision.
There were a couple of areas that were of particular interest to me, the first being a discussion on the LoRaWAN architecture. LoRaWAN is a low-powered wide-area network technology that is well suited to IoT use cases. Whilst LoRaWAN is capable of only low data rates (300 bps - 5.5kbps) it is capable of distances up to 15km in rural circumstances and can offer a battery life for devices of up to 10 years! So if you need to track a herd of cattle in a field, or how full a set of bins are in a rural park an IoT solution utilising LoRaWAN might be the right solution for you.
The second interesting part was the Cisco Industrial Asset Vision solution. This was an end to end, customisationable but standardised and ready to deploy IoT solution, including sensors, gateways as well as a cloud-based dashboard to monitor, report and troubleshoot.
This solution will fit a wide amount of use cases due to the large array of sensors available and will be ideally suited to organisations that want an out of the box IoT solution to their business needs, rather than developing something specific from separate parts.
