A technology I haven’t had the chance to talk about until now, mostly because I hadn’t really gotten hands-on with it yet—but one with enormous potential: Wirepas is a managed mesh radio solution, or rather, a radio-agnostic mesh solution. While its most common current use is over BLE at 2.4GHz, it’s far from limited to that.

This week was Open, Wirepas’ annual event, which I had the chance to attend for Rtone, an official Wirepas partner that develops many client solutions using this technology, I work for. So, this is the perfect occasion to share with you the latest updates and my impressions of the event.

To start, it’s important to know that Open is a selective event. Participants are individually invited, and overall, the attendee list is impressive—making it an exceptional venue for both technical and business discussions. There’s ample room for exchanges, and with under 200 people coming from more than 30 different countries, over two days, it’s easy to talk to almost everyone. Around twenty sponsor exhibitors were present, showcasing what the ecosystem can offer. And then there are the inside jokes and traditions only the initiated understand and appreciate.

Let’s start with the setting—Finland, where the technology originated. Yes, Wirepas is made in Europe, and its capitalization appears to be local as well. The venue? A barn in the Helsinki suburbs, complete with straw chairs and logs for nail-driving contests. Endless daylight. And of course, Mom, who sadly wasn’t present this year. In my opinion, she’s the best marketing move in IoT. You have to see her videos to understand what a model influencer truly is.

As is often the case with IoT tech events like Sigfox Connect in the past or The Things Conference, we spent two days attending conferences (case studies or technical presentations) and networking.

Some words about the Wirepas technology

Since I’ve never covered Wirepas before, let me give you a brief overview before getting back to the event—especially since even those who’ve heard about it usually only know a limited part.

So, it’s a self-formed, self-healing mesh network. There will always be one or more local sink in a Wirepas setup to manage the mesh network and optionnaly one or more gateways for connecting to an external network (Internet or otherwise), enabling both data transmission and network management. You’ll see this kind of topology in OramaNet, which I’ll talk about soon (yes, I’m super behind on my testing 😓).

This contrasts with Meshtastic, which I’ve discussed before—Meshtastic isn’t managed and is designed only for node-to-node communication. Wirepas, on the other hand, can handle node-to-server, server-to-node, and node-to-node. To support this, there are routers nodes that relay traffic internally and gateways externally, as well as anchors (nodes with larger batteries that prioritize relaying traffic).

Beyond that, it’s a mesh network with dynamic topology selection that allows communications to take the optimal route to the destination, adapting automatically when nodes, anchors, or gateways are added or removed. The network supports relatively high data rates (typically 1 Mbps), though sub-GHz use cases naturally offer lower throughput. It supports native OTA updates.

The network operates with very low energy consumption. BLE tags for inventory management can last 3–5 years with a form factor of roughly 15x10x5mm—key for optimizing TCO.

It also enables geolocation of nodes via anchors, which are fixed in position and use RSSI-based triangulation for locating devices.

The technology is radio-agnostic, which means it can be deployed on sub-GHz bands in some use cases, predominantly 2.4GHz today, and even on 1.9GHz via DECT NR+, which provides long-range coverage and benefits from a less congested spectrum. While this version has yet to see mass adoption (more on that later), it offers many advantages over LoRa mesh and even LoRaWAN for applications like smart buildings, smart industry, or smart cities—any scenario with a coverage radius of a few kilometers.

At 2.4GHz, Wirepas uses standard BLE chips—currently from Nordic or SiLabs—keeping BOM costs low, aided by low power requirements that allow for small batteries. That said, it’s not free: there are licensing fees for gateways and for every node/device added.

In fact, the main obstacle to broad adoption is the developer license, which is the entry point for any project. This is a deliberate choice, as seen in other tech like Kineis, aimed at offering quality support to serious clients capable of investing in development. This, unfortunately, prevents hobbyists like me from accessing it. However, for functional testing, it’s enough to acquire pre-configured devices, which are widely available and come with the necessary licenses—so you can ignore licensing entirely for initial out-of-the-box experimentation.

For mass IoT deployment in smart building, smart cities, inventory managements…

Now that this very brief intro is done, let’s return to the event content. I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions, especially on the second day as I got caught up by work, so this summary may not be exhaustive.

First off, it’s worth noting that most presentations were business-focused. I expected a deep technical dive to finally understand all the details of the tech—but clearly, that wasn’t the intent. I was a bit disappointed, but considering the audience—deeply embedded in industrial IoT but not necessarily interested in bits & bytes—it made sense.

In some talks, I felt like I was reliving Sigfox Connect from a decade ago or the TTC & LoRa Alliance conferences from five years back: the same use cases, the same sky-high ROI promises—many of which I’ve seen in 1000 PoCs that never scaled. So I’m very curious to see if Wirepas will be the miracle solution—but to be honest, I doubt it. I’ve come to believe that for these kinds of use cases, the issue isn’t the tech but the industrial sector itself.

Still, there were some bright spots and clearly valuable use cases.

First: indoor asset tracking/management. Already fairly deployed, e.g., in hospitals, where very small tags with long autonomy can be geolocated across large surfaces and floors, thanks to a long-life anchor network. Low infrastructure costs (anchors need no external power, install in minutes, and cost a few dozen euros) and ultra-low device costs (a few euros) make large-scale deployments viable. This renders the Wirepas business model scalable, enabling users to extract value even from low-stakes use cases (e.g., efficiency gains).

Second: metering. I didn’t expect this for Wirepas, but in India, massive deployments are underway—6 millions of meters already deployed, growing at over hundreds of thousands / month. Using Sub-GHz frequencies ensures good penetration and range, drastically reducing the number of meters acting as gateways with 4G backhaul.

But the biggest opportunity, illustrated in several talks, is smart building—especially connected lighting. Beyond brightness control, the lighting network can do much more. Lights are close together and form a dense, building-wide mesh. They have continuous power and, if built to fit standard sockets, can be installed in seconds as replacements.

Wirepas provides an efficient network layer and acts as a relay for dedicated devices, allowing these lights to carry numerous sensors and functions: air quality, energy savings, presence detection, security, people counting, environmental data…

Buildings are a major environmental challenge: 40% of emissions come from them, largely due to poor automation. IoT can make them smart—automation slashes energy use. The cost of IoT automation is only ~2% of total building cost, but it directly impacts 40% of CO₂ emissions. It’s a great IT for Green example.

Siemens’ vision of collaborative smart buildings—where buildings share data for global optimization—targets 2030. Legislative changes will be the main driver of this transformation, and IoT’s role in it is massive.

These three use cases share two major strengths: they’re replicable and scalable.

IoT might also soon be driven by the increasing complexity of balancing electric grids. No one planned for a high density of EVs charging at home. Intelligent charging regulation will quickly become necessary—requiring fine control of production and consumption.

What’s going on the tech stack ?

Back to the technical stack: security was a big focus. Several important evolutions were presented, especially around upcoming regulations like RED (effective in a few months) and CRA (coming soon). These will massively impact existing IoT devices—and as early as August, many products may lose their CE marking due to lack of preparedness.

Wirepas offers a strong advantage here, with a rich stack that includes encryption and authentication for communications (standard), as well as true OTA firmware update capabilities—though it uses a proprietary SDK. Updates are encrypted and authenticated.

Future stack updates will improve these features, including automatic key rotation and encryption/integrity of data stored in flash memory.

Secure onboarding will also improve, with dynamic node joins via a end-to-end secure channel with the Network Management System, established through the first relay hop.

A word on DECT NR+: its rollout is still slow, even though Wirepas supports it. The bottleneck is the lack of chips optimized for OFDM modulation on 1.9GHz. Current chips are mostly LTE-M, which are expensive and inefficient for mesh use. However, major chipmakers were at the event—SiLabs (which just passed 10M chips sold for Wirepas), Nordic, the two Wirepas’ historic partners and another big player on other RF chip market. This could be a good sign: a purpose-built chip would be a major enabler, and the technology holds real promise. DECT NR+ is standardized with big players like Legrand, Schneider, and Siemens.

And lastly, a new NR+ variant was announced at 915MHz. Its purpose is unclear, but it may allow faster rollout while waiting for FCC approval of 1.9GHz NR+.

My last words goes to Finland and the Org team

Finally, big thanks to the Wirepas team for the warm welcome, and to Finland—a beautiful country, though I’m still unsure why the customs dog seemed to take an unusual interest in me on arrival. Also, I got to eat a Fourme d’Ambert Hawaiian pizza 2,000 km from home… at 10 PM with daylight like it was 5 PM. That’s unique ! The curiosity to try the chorizo–crayfish pizza with same great guys makes me want to return next year.