Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1423232
Report Title: Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN ® deployment synergies Issue Date: September 2019 Version: 1.0. final version 21 LoRa Alliance & Wireless Broadband Alliance Confidential & Proprietary Copyright © 2019 Providing an affordable IoT connectivity infrastructure is crucial to enable the realization of a variety of use cases in a city environment. Both Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN ® technologies play an increasingly strategic role, which will be discussed below in more detail. Wi-Fi use cases Smart City Medium-range implementation of Wi-Fi has become the table stake to provide public broadband services in cities. Wi-Fi presence is now part of the city brand as it's being used as a service towards tourists and inhabitants. Location based content on landing pages gives nearby information to tourists in multiple languages. Cities are forced to deploy concurrently backbone networks (fiber optics) to back- haul Wi-Fi collected data to centralized cloud servers. Wi-Fi service must be faster than mobile data connection in order to be used by citizens. For tourists, Wi-Fi is an opportunity to avoid roaming costs in some foreign countries. Mesh technologies are challenging in cities due to the missing lines of sight. Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies provide easy to deploy off-the-shelf solutions. Moreover, Wi-Fi mesh has gained traction as connectivity for smart city use cases like smart lighting controller. Since the streetlights are at 12- 24 feet height, Wi-Fi Mesh as backhaul solution is getting more traction. There are other solutions for the controller back haul including LoRaWAN®, cellular and proprietary connectivity. Cities are under political pressure and need to get permanent citizen feedback to improve local services. Wi-Fi is the perfect technology to handle that. In the last 2-3 years, there has been a trend in cities to offer free Wi-Fi to tourists and citizens. The counter part is to get an efficient citizen and tourist attendance monitoring system. Moreover, the European Union has set up a program called "Wi-Fi for EU" – or WiFi4Eu as it has officially been branded -, funding Wi-Fi projects that offer free internet service to tourists and citizens. As a result, cities have started to implement Wi-Fi access points at crowded places or places where people hang out. With the Wi-Fi 6 supporting low latency and target wakeup time, Wi-Fi can be also used for smart city applications such as smart parking. Smart Village As highlighted by the government owed Centre for Development of Telematics in India (C-DOT), Wi-Fi as a technology has a potential to convert a village into a smart village with very low investment and sustainable business models. The concept of smart village is defined as any village equipped with technology which enables its habitants to connect to the mainstream digital economy of their country. The main goal of the smart village is to effectively address the day-to-day needs such as health, education, farming, irrigation, through technology which otherwise might not be available all the time with other conventional resources. Another major goal is to create local employments, encourage entrepreneurship among the people living in the village with the help of technology. Internet connectivity is mandatory to make all these goals possible, to create e-health, e-education etc. infrastructure which require a robust connectivity to interact with remote experts or contents. In a country like India, VLE (Village Level Entrepreneurship) is a flagship program enabled through Digital India where local people are encouraged to own the digital infrastructure.