January was a breakthrough month for the Internet of Things. First, the LoRa Alliance announced that the number of LoRaWAN network operators increased by more than 60% in 2018, with more than 100 network operators now delivering low-power solutions to organizations worldwide.

Then last week, Semtech announced that the total installed base of LoRa-enabled chips and nodes reached 80 million at the end of 2018. Alistair Fulton, Semtech’s vice president and general manager of the company’s wireless and sensing products group, went as far as to say that LoRa technology has been established as "the de facto platform of LPWA networks."

Given these growth levels, there’s nothing at all surprising about that statement—it verbalizes what a good portion of the industry already knows. One of the reasons we’re so excited by LoRa is that it mirrors the same principles that Longview embraces: scalability, security, reliability, and performance. We’re proud to have such a strong, open foundation upon which we’ve built the industry’s most comprehensive IoT solutions—application, cloud, gateway and sensors—all from a single vendor.

We’re excited that our confidence in LoRa is proving to be well-founded. It’s a great IoT protocol and the LoRa Alliance is a great group for bringing it to fruition. Longview is looking forward to becoming a bigger part of that success in 2019.