How to ensure you are purchasing carrier- or industrial-grade IoT connectivity solutions

By Stephane Dejean, Kerlink CMO

The Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionize the way cities, utilities, public-service agencies and enterprises operate and conduct many aspects of their activities, including streamlining critical business processes and launching new connected services for their citizens, users and customers.

Kerlink is helping to power that revolution. It is widely recognized for its mastery of the entire IoT connectivity- hardware value chain because of its deep expertise in product, radio performance, energy-efficiency, security design, manufacturing processes, quality management, and its ability to adapt to customers’ needs. Kerlink, a founding and current board member of the LoRaAlliance®, has built upon its success launching the first LoRaWAN gateway in the industry in 2014 – its top-selling Wirnet™ Station. In the past five years, the company has conceived, designed and built a market-leading, performant and robust LoRaWAN® hardware-and-software portfolio to ensure its customers have optimal IoT connectivity. Kerlink customers have validated the company’s industrial- and carrier-grade designs through major deployments in Europe, South Asia, Oceania and South America for tier-one telecom operators, major transportation companies and large utilities. Since its creation, Kerlink has supported many customized field deployments for various vertical IoT segments, and multiple innovative business models, and has continuously met demanding quality-of-service (QoS) requirements.

Ensuring a reliable, safe and secure IoT

As Kerlink has grown along with the IoT, it has learned what the future of reliable, safe and secure IoT connectivity will require. First, with tremendous numbers of sensors and multiple devices being connected in the field over private and public IoT networks, IoT standards and technology must ensure scalability, availability and versatility to provide enough cost-efficient and highly performant capacity to broadly collect and transmit the tremendous amounts of data and messages. With billions of devices being connected to networks globally with massive IoT, the number of innovative solutions will continue to skyrocket.

Second, IoT networks and their hardware-and-software components must be easily deployable and manageable in demanding conditions to ensure optimal performance, reliability and scalability for long-term service. The best components and solutions also will have to provide modularity to meet customers’ specific business & operations requirements and key performance indicators (KPIs). They also must enable ubiquitous and high-performing connectivity density at scale, especially to deliver the versatile and cost-efficient “last-mile coverage” required to unlock massive IoT deployments and enable the rise of private networks for cities, businesses and industries.

Essential characteristics of leading IoT-solution providers

But finding a real best-in-class, industrial-grade IoT solution requires looking deeply into an IoT vendor’s global industrial approach and the development of the vendor’s technology and products. While it might be convenient to rely on lab-based measurements of a vendor’s gateways or the presumed attractiveness of the list price of a vendor’s technology, customers should not compromise their IoT solutions by being misled by the glitter of the marketing pitch.

At Kerlink, we are convinced that claims of being a leader and of having the best solution are not enough if not strongly supported by facts and a proven track record, customer testimonials and broad industry recognition.

Kerlink strongly believes that cities, utilities, public-service agencies and enterprises must verify that their potential vendors can meet five essential characteristics of leadership in industrial IoT connectivity solutions. So, on Jan. 30 we will begin a five-part series of posts on our blog to share with you what those characteristics are. We hope you will tune in to discover the “5 Characteristics of Leading Industrial IoT Connectivity Solution Providers”.

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