The movement towards smart cities accelerated during the pandemic-driven rise in digitalization, which includes public and private Internet of Things (IoT) networks. While IoT connectivity improves the quality of life in smart cities, ensuring continuous security and network stability can require significant amounts of capital and seamless collaboration with multiple vendors. Kerlink overcomes these obstacles by providing reliable, robust, and cost effective IoT connectivity networks, software, products and solutions for businesses and cities.
To help its customers join the digitalization era, Kerlink offers a flexible model tailored to create reallife use cases in three major domains: smart agriculture & environment, smart buildings & industry and smart cities & quality of life. Tailoring its deployments to specific needs, for example, a smart-city ecosystem, Kerlink takes into consideration the needs of various IoT use cases by introducing its network-as-a-service (NaaS) approach that can scale with the deployment of new and future services.
As a leading global provider of end-to-end network solutions for LoRaWAN® networks, Kerlink serves telecom operators, businesses and cities worldwide. More than 200,000 Kerlink installations have been deployed in more than 70 countries in just over a decade. The company supplies north of 350 customers worldwide and enables significant deployments in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Japan and Oceania.
LoRaWAN® is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol built on Semtech’s LoRa® wireless RF, approved as a standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) since last December. It is promoted by the LoRa Alliance®, which Kerlink co-founded and serves as a board member. The protocol supports energy-efficient, low-cost, longrange, bi-directional communication, and has deep indoor penetration for IoT and Machine to Machine (M2M) applications. Running on free, unlicensed ISM frequencies worldwide, this connectivity allows costefficient deployments and operations for public and private networks. In addition to deep-indoor coverage, Kerlink solutions offer coverage of up to 3km in urban environments and extended battery lifetimes of up to 10 years.
In Southeast Asia, Kerlink is working with a telecom company in Singapore to deploy its stateof-the-art LoRaWAN® gateways to connect batteryoperated devices to regional, national and global IoT networks, for numerous smart-city applications. These include smart metering, connected streetlights, smartbuilding solutions and rodent monitoring, as well as innovations in urban smart farming applications that support sustainable vegetable production in vertical greenhouses towering above Singapore.
In Indonesia, Jakarta and most cities in Java are transforming and modernizing fast thanks to new infrastructure development as well as new technology IoT Networks Tailored for Smart Cities Kerlink SOLUTIONS PROVIDERS - 2022 SMART CITY TOP 10 introductions. IKI (Pt. IoT Kreasi Indonesia), a group focusing on energy services, is deploying smartmetering solutions with Kerlink for the retail and property development sectors, and city governments. IKI has become the one-stop, end-to-end IOT solution provider for various applications and sensors, all contributing to developing new smart cities: smart solution for gas, water and electricity metering, post and pre-paid connected metering, parking sensors, environment monitoring, predictive maintenance of distributed assets (pump/motor), smart streetlights, and analytics solutions for malls and retailers.
In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Kerlink’s partner Cloud Energy allows the municipality of HCMC to take advantage of a new, purpose-built LoRaWAN® network infrastructure for various use cases.
Another approach of smart cities in Vietnam is targeting new green-field cities, an industrial park where a private consortium is investing in ready-made digital services from day one. With VIOT Group, a smart digital company for urban and industrial park development, is deploying first in the northern part of Vietnam, in Hai Phong and HaNoi provinces, a network of several hundreds of sites with Kerlink. Main applications are smart streetlighting, smart metering, air and water quality monitoring, and early flood-incident management systems.
While working on multiple projects with its municipal, agricultural and commercial customers, Kerlink continues to investigate the capacity to enhance smart IoT systems locally by using edge computing. Kerlink understands that users are not solely dependent on a cloud solution and can also take preventive action with local computing and algorithms. These include, for example, alerts sent to network operators when system anomalies are detected.
Kerlink is working with a public telecom company in Singapore to deploy a solid underlying public infrastructure with the flexibility and scalability to establish a communication network for any application, while staying eco-friendly
As smart cities must rely a lot on their data, it’s critical to ensure their integrity, security and the share of right to access to it. To enhance those elements, the addition of blockchain and notably smart contracts into our product portfolio is the next step. For example, smart contracts could ensure that people accessing the data have the right to access it and they know it has not been altered, which is important to leverage on the data and ensure its robustness.
Moreover, Kerlink is looking forward to investing in infrastructure services, sensors for Industry 4.0 applications and other edge-computing applications.