The Things Conference 2022

TheThingsConference 2022

This week saw the return of face-to-face of The Things Conference after long years of virtual events. The Things Conference is the major LoRaWAN ecosystem event. Not as commercial as LoRa Alliance event (even if the conference is a source of revenue for TheThingsIndustry), thanks to the presence of most of the guy’s who are doing the IoT.

This edition has interesting weak signals like the presence of a team from Unabiz (previously Sigfox), some Helium bashing at some time, even if most of the attendees have been participating on The People Network.

It’s a conference I can place on the maturity rising, many talk about use-cases, less about technologies. Lots of workshops where we have been able to implement / test advanced technologies like Lacuna Space communications or Semtech low power tracker.

Here are my through from the really great edition of TheThingsConference2022

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TheThingsConference 2021

New year, new edition of TheThingsConference, the main LPWan event now.

As this event is a big community event including industries, silicon providers, service providers, operator, integrator… It’s a big opportunity for all these people to meet altogether. 2021 due to covid-19 pandemic is online as most of the IoT events currently. Question were, how will be the quality, how will be the interaction within the community ?

TheThingsConference already had a virtual event in 2020 some month after the yearly physical conference and basically it has been a success. It also has been a good training or this 2021 event. As a consequence the event quality (platform, keynote video, talk video) have a really good quality. They basically taken benefit of the new capabilities of the recorded video like to play with a 3D device in the middle of the scene. So that really cool.

They have also taken into account the different time-shift and replaying all the conferences on different slots to allows people to follow it on normal hour. That’s great a better than the previous edition (a 24h non stop event… fun but difficult). The conference is taking place on a whole week

Interaction between the community, at least over the chat is really good and this is also a success… I’ll complete that post all along the conference but we can start seing what has been announced during the keynote.

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The Things Industry is taking the lead on LoRaWAN ecosystem

Today was the first day of The Things Conference (TTC) 2020 in Amsterdam. TTC is the yearly event organized by The Things Network initiative. Years after years this event is becoming THE world LoRaWan event. The Things Network let the floor to The Things Industry, all the LoRaWan industrial ecosystem is coming to Amsterdam to discuss about the future of this LPWAn technology. The community spirit is still here, strong and awesome: I had plenty of discussions with many tech & business guy I never met before ; I’ve learned a lot of thing through the high quality conferences. Two days of conference will be too short for meeting people I’ve listed and follow the conference track.

So let’s talk a bit about the content of this first days and the direction The Things Industry is giving to LoRaWan ecosystem. Because, trust me or not, even if the LoRaWan alliance is full of big telecom companies, it really seems that, this small group of 20 awesome people from TTN are taking the lead.

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LPWAN is not red ocean market

LPWAN stands for Low Power Wide Area Networks. These technologies are the heart of the innovative IoT technologies. They are allowing sensors / devices to work and communicate for years with really small power requirements. They are enabling long range communication, allowing low costs networks. The first coming on the market was Sigfox with a commercial offer in 2013. After that, a first country-wide LoRaWan public network was deployed in 2016. 3GPP technologies, LTE-M and NB-IoT are completing the panel of solutions with large deployments starting in years 2017-2018.

All along the technology emergence journey, the most frequent question was to find the one going to eat the others. Regarding the market size and the involved money, the communication strategy for the telecoms industry was to consider it and make it a red ocean. The consequences on adoption were not without delaying the customer projects and the IoT market growth.

Blue Ocean strategy is coming from a book written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Basically it’s about the way you build your business. In red ocean (fishes are fighting each others and blood makes the color) you design your product for targeting the exact same use-cases and clients than competition. You have a frontal competition. In a blue ocean (peaceful) you design your product’s strength based on competition weakness. You create a complementary product on the market. You make different customers satisfied.

Six years from now the first networks was opened. Now that all the technological solutions are proven, I can clearly confirm a blue ocean for all these LPWAN technologies. Actors should switch to blue ocean strategy to accelerate #IoT business and accelerate profit acquisition.

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