TCD joins LoRa Alliance to help expand and develop the ‘Internet Age’

College joins the association which seeks to promote the Lo Ra protocol, to standardise low-power wide area networks

NEWSTrinity is the first Irish university to join the non-profit organisation LoRa – global internet of things Alliance. Here it will help expand this global base of expertise and internet connectivity for future ingenuity.

The LoRa Alliance is a non-profit association of members who believe the era of the internet (or as they call it, the “internet of things”  – IOT ) is now. Thus, they propose that as a global society we need to be mobilising to enrich and develop this for future generations and resources.

The ‘internet of things’ is a term coined to describe the next step in connectivity technology – a global network of objects, people and machinery able to connect to the internet. As Neil Gross described in BusinessWeek in 1999, “..planet earth will don an electric skin. It will use the internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations”. Some argue that this is already the case, with more devices currently connected to the internet than people. However, there are broader applications to be explored.

Significantly, LoRa’s industry-led directors want to utilise LoRa to standardise low-power wide area networks on a global, national and industrial scale. The previous and incoming Irish governments have prioritised the current low or non-existent broadband network in Ireland on their manifestos; thus Trinity’s involvement in LoRa’s project will prove invaluable.

Within this set-up, Trinity will serve as LoRa’s research base for future networks and communications through a ‘Connect Centre’ or its Science Foundation of Ireland research centre. It will therefore be at the root of LoRa’s global knowledge distribution between industry and international co-ordinators within the alliance.

The Connect Centre’s Director, Professor Linda Doyle, said Trinity’s membership places them alongside other involved groups such as Orange, IBM and Cisco. Moreover serving as a research headquarters for LoRa “will bring excellent research expertise as we work together to enable connectivity for internet of things applications such as smart cities and industrial applications”.

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