Senet: Intelligent and Scalable Low Power WAN for IoT

George Dannecker, CEO & President

Internet of Things (IoT) is the most hyped technology today and holds the potential to impact the way humans live and work. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, a 30 percent increase from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. The research firm also estimates 5.5 million new things will get connected every day in 2016. It’s forecasted that the majority of these devices will require low-bandwidth connectivity covering wide geographical areas. Achieving the same is easier said than done since managing remote IoT applications demands reliability, long range, long battery life, bidirectional capability and lower implementation costs. In this regard, cellular, satellite and other forms of networks prove to be cost prohibitive and are limited in range. Coming to rescue is a U.S. based firm Senet, which is poised to deliver the critical cost effective connectivity solutions to enable the coming IoT market explosion. “We are putting an infrastructure in place for any industry that needs low cost connectivity for smart devices, sensors and actuators across a wide geographical area,” remarks George Dannecker, CEO and President, Senet.

Senet provides the next generation of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) for the rapidly growing IoT market. LPWAN enables the value driven IoT applications to unlock the Return On Investment (ROI) by enabling them to connect over a long range, covering a 15-mile radius, along with long battery life of up to 10 years. “Low cost, low power and secure, the Senet Network has distinct advantages over cellular, WiFi, and other emerging connectivity technologies for the IoT market,” extols Dannecker. In addition to LPWAN, the company also indulges in developing robust Operational Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), low cost sensors, radios, and low cost long range network gateways to make the IoT network more reliable and scalable.

Low cost, low-power and secure, the Senet Network has distinct advantages over cellular, WiFi, and other emerging connectivity technologies for the IoT market

The company is experienced in delivering reliable Low Power Wide Area Networks and a simplified IoT connectivity platform radically reducing the time required to bring IoT applications to market. Senet works with the open-standards architecture of the global LoRaTM Alliance enabling the customers to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions throughout the IoT application delivery stack. This enables all the LoRaTM IoT applications to reside on a single network, facilitating bi-directional communications to not only receive the sensor data but also control them.

The company’s IoT solutions find wide adoption across many different use cases from tracking assets in logistics to enabling the heating fuel suppliers to remotely monitor customer’s tanks. In the latter case, Senet offers the EnerTracSE Fuel Delivery Automation solution built on LoRaTM, to help heating oil and propane dealers to manage rising delivery costs and demanding and price-sensitive customers. The solution combines integrated back office software, LPWAN, and Senet‘s eSensor technology to captures all the customer tank levels at once, multiple times a day. This data is then sent daily to the supplier, giving them a continuous report that helps consolidate deliveries, forecast fuel usage, and schedule servicing to avoid run-outs. This typically results in operational cost savings of up to 30 percent per year.

“There are two things that matter in the IoT marketplace today,” says Dannecker. First, the need to run a large number of apps on a network and Senet is spending majority of its resources to get commercially viable solutions to achieve the same. Second, the need to build a network that covers large geographic areas, and the company, with its LPWAN is ambitious to complete U.S. network coverage. “We will claim success when we have complete U.S. network coverage and have hundreds of apps running on it,” remarks Dannecker. “These are the two objectives that we continue to drive.”