ThingPark Exchange, the first global peering hub featuring LoRaWAN® in the industry, is going through accelerated growth and is already connecting 18 LoRaWAN networks worldwide, with many public LoRaWAN service providers as well as multiple private networks and large industrial solution providers.
The ThingPark Exchange platform facilitates the activation of devices in any country for solution providers with a global footprint. Many other networks are currently under negotiations to join the hub and simplify global activation for their customers. ThingPark™, Actility’s IoT platform, is already being used by the vast majority of nationwide LoRaWAN network service providers (over 50) and hundreds of companies all over the world.
Availability of the join servers also signifies that ThingPark Exchange is used for both “roaming” and “activation”, hence it is called a “peering hub”, not just a “roaming hub”. By adding the support of its ThingPark Activation Service on top of the ThingPark Exchange peering hub, Actility makes it easy for large device manufacturers to securely manufacture devices and roll them out across the globe without the hassle of sharing device credentials with each network individually.
For solution providers, who need more than initial activation and also care about processing the data, the peering hub also solves the issue of diversity of commissioning and dataflow interfaces on each network. As LoRaWAN uses an unlicensed spectrum, any LoRa Alliance® member is allowed to register a “NetID” and own a home network and may collect all traffic, on any network, using the standard LoRaWAN Backend 1.x Interface. ThingPark Exchange enables solution providers to gain global connectivity with only one interface to their own home network server, solving the engineering headache often associated with large, multi-network deployments and integration.
ThingPark Exchange is based on the LoRa Alliance Backend Interface standard, hence it is available to any standards-compliant network regardless of its vendor. The interface also allows to collect any kind of message-oriented data from any technology and use LoRaWAN frames as a presentation layer. The list of connected networks already includes several platforms built by vendors other than Actility, and even satellite networks using message-oriented communication exposed as LoRaWAN® frames. Even though the initial footprint is mainly from Europe, due to readiness of the LoRaWAN networks for roaming, ThingPark Exchange provides an international service catering to networks across the world, just like any other ThingPark service of Actility.
LoRaWAN roaming footprint is rapidly growing. Actility would be happy to help you join this journey and maximize the benefits of LoRaWAN for you by interconnecting your network with others around the world. As a network operator, public or private, connecting to ThingPark Exchange opens the door to roaming with an ever-growing list of terrestrial and satellite networks and trusted activation (join) servers. The business model of ThingPark Exchange is that of a technology enabler, which does not take any share of connectivity fees among connected networks. ThingPark Exchange routes the LPWAN traffic and establishes neutral usage detail records across participating networks. Connected networks are completely free to negotiate their own inter-company roaming rates on peer to peer basis and do not need to disclose this tariff structure to Actility.
