Vula opens up IoT network

INTERNET OF THINGS: CONNECTING BILLIONS OF DEVICES

Piggybacking off the unregulated ‘Wi-Fi broadband’ Vula Investments hopes to be first out of the blocks in bringing South Africa a true IoT experience.

Vula Investments, the energy and telecommunications investment vehicle chaired by Mark Headbush – a key figure behind the launch of Wireless Business Solutions and iBurst – plans to build a nationwide Internet of things (IoT) network through subsidiary Vula Telematix.

Roll-out in Gauteng and Cape Town, to be followed by Bloemfontein and Durban, is under way. Vula Telematix, whose other shareholder is Cape Town-based Unipalm Investment Holdings, is deploying technology from US IoT specialist Ingenu (formerly On-Ramp Wireless).

Room for all

Vula Investments’ CEO Max Makgoale, who is also CEO of Vula Telematix, says he believes the market is big enough to support all the networks rolling out in South Africa.

Dark Fibre Africa, through Sqwidnet, is also deploying a nationwide network using technology from France’s Sigfox, while Vodacom and MTN have expressed interest in building infrastructure based on the nascent Narrowband IoT technology standard being developed by the cellular industry.

Vula Telematix’s network uses the unlicensed 2,4GHz “Wi-Fi hotspot” spectrum, which Makgoale says can reach IoT devices in buildings and even underground.

“It is perceived to be a very congested spectrum band, but it’s also very wide spectrum. Being wide spectrum, means there are lots of opportunities to optimise it,” he said. “You can transmit between channels, for example. The secret sauce in RPMA allows us to operate without interference and get higher throughput to endpoint devices.”

Ingenu’s technology is able to deliver superior throughput speeds – 55kbit/s on the uplink and 20kbit/s on the downlink – which makes it better suited than some rival technologies, Makgoale said. He believes delivering firmware updates to IoT devices will become crucial in the future given security concerns. “If you have a million devices out there, you simply have to be able to send firmware updates to them.”

Vula Investments built the Ithuba lottery network. Subsidiary Telsaf Data has deployed point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections for some of the country’s big operators.

Vula, Makgoale says, is in talks with Ingenu about licensing its technology throughout southern Africa. “South Africa will be the springboard to the roll-out.”

He declined to say how much the company is investing in the network, describing it as “significant”.

It has secured a deal to do smart metering for the Drakenstein (Paarl) municipality and is running several pilots around the country through partners, including an agriculture project, a refuse management system and a livestock tracking system.

Blue-sky opportunity

Eventually, IoT will be “bigger than mobile” when measured using the number of connected devices, Makgoale said. “There is space for everyone. If you believe half of what the analysts say, there will be billions and billions of devices connected. Even if that is an overestimation, and you believe only half of what they’re predicting, there’s still enough space for everyone.”

This article was first published on TechCentral.