Introducing Kerlink’s special Internet of Things series:  5 Characteristics of Leading Industrial IoT Connectivity Solution Providers (Part1)

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. Its mastery of the entire IoT connectivity-hardware value chain, its deep expertise in designing and producing hardware and software, and its ability to adapt to customers’ needs have established Kerlink as a global leader in designing and deploying public & private IoT networks, for reliable, turnkey, IoT connectivity solutions.

We have grown with the IoT sector. Working closely with our customers has guided our expansion from a hardware manufacturer to a provider of complete solutions for the entire process of network design, deployment and management to unlock the real potential of the IoT.

With this background, we will summarize our insights for identifying, selecting and trusting an IoT partner in this five-week series. The series will be followed with release of a comprehensive white paper covering in greater detail the

“5 characteristics of leading industrial IoT solution connectivity providers”

The series:

·         Characteristic 1: Exceptional hardware and software product design – Jan. 30

·         Characteristic 2: Supported and verified industrial production processes – Feb. 6

·         Characteristic 3: Certified overall quality management – Feb.13

·         Characteristic 4: Locally supported field operations – Feb. 20

·         Characteristic 5: Ongoing excellent customer satisfaction – Feb. 25

Characteristic 1: Exceptional hardware and software product design

Our products are designed according to strict, precise customer requirements and thorough analyses of customers’ business and technology KPIs.  They are specifically designed for their intended use (indoor or outdoor), openness of the network (public or private), performance requirements (radio, battery, security and backhaul management), anticipated quality-of-service metrics (QoS) and service-level agreements (SLAs), along with the anticipated use cases. Kerlink products are modular and customizable by design because we recognize that our customers need flexibility to adapt their IoT solutions to each deployment and jobs-to-be-done with no loss of performance.

Kerlink manages its technology lifecycle – from initial design to sunsetting – to ensure constant quality and performance of its solutions. It monitors production quality to identify design improvements including components, methods of production, instructional guidelines and more. This monitoring starts from the production line forward and takes into account direct polling of all products manufactured by Kerlink.

Carrier-grade products to meet industrial and carrier requirements

Kerlink focuses heavily on the carrier-grade design of its IoT technology to ensure the highest quality available for its historical carrier customers and its expanding industrial and cities partners. Carrier-grade technology ensures:

• High-capacity systems
• Robust and long-term design elements
• Enhanced radio performance in varied and demanding environments
• Interference mitigation based on RF engineering deep expertise
• Field validation with mobile network operators, especially for installations in ultra-dense 3G/4G cellular environments
• Colocation of equipment with base transceiver stations (BTS), as featured in carriers’ installation guidelines and best practices.

Kerlink’s carrier customers regularly attest to the high quality of Kerlink IoT solutions.

“Tata Communications’ LoRaWAN networks offer an overall availability higher than 99 percent, and Kerlink carrier-grade solutions have demonstrated their robustness and reliability through three monsoon cycles in India.”

Eric Torres, VP & Head of Business Operations & Solution Engineering, TCTS

Security by design

In addition to hardware-based security, which is vital to all Kerlink solutions, software-based security design brings even higher levels of integrity to Kerlink’s hardware. This hardware-and-software-based design encompasses a broad range of protections including:

• Secure Boot that gives Kerlink’s gateways software and hardware isolation and secure pairing thanks to high-level authentication procedures, unique security signatures and integrity checking to prevent unauthorized software updates.
• Secure Storage that ensures physical protection of security assets and intelligence, like radio keys and certificates, in Prove & Run’s ProvenCore secured Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that has recently been awarded the Common Criteria EAL7 certification Secured links and backhaul protection using OpenVPN/IPsec tunneling with embedded capabilities.
• Reboot watchdog that permanently offers systems the ability to fallback to previous management configurations or factory default configurations to recover if boot issues are not fixed.

Kerlink’s gateways are unique in offering this heightened built-in level of security that benefits  both carrier- and industrial-grade private and public IoT networks.

Gateways that optimize radio performance and energy efficiency

Gateways and gateway design are among the most important aspects of Kerlink’s IoT  solution. The company has mastered hardware development and embedded software design to create industrial- and carrier-grade gateways that optimize radio performance and energy efficiency. Demanding public operators like Tata Communications, Orange, Proximus, KPN, Spark and YEAP!, as well as new entrants like Boston Networks, eleven-x, IoT Americas and SenRa, among others, have provided testimonials supporting the robustness, reliability and performance of Kerlink solutions. These enterprises, through nationwide or large regional deployments, have generated real-world IoT use cases to support their day-to-day customer interactions.

Other industrial-by-design features built in to Kerlink’s process and products, and which will be explained in the white paper, include:

• Electronics sourcing
• Carrier-grade products to meet industrial and carrier needs
• Gateway hardware and software design
• Gateway continuous improvement and quality metrics approach

Look beyond the marketing

It is exciting to be part of fast-growing industry sector and to see the entrepreneurial  response to meet requirements of new markets.  With the IoT, companies, cities and facilities such as airports and harbors are eager to bring benefits of the Internet of Things to work for them and the customers, users and citizens they serve. But while it might be convenient to rely on lab-based measurements of a vendor’s gateways or the advertised prices of its technology, buyers should look beyond the marketing material to find the best solution for them and their end users over the long haul.

Providing them with in-depth information to guide their decisions is the purpose of this series of articles.

See you next week!