Comcast’s machineQ enterprise IoT network is rolling out in a dozen new markets following a series of trials announced at the end of last year.
According to Comcast, Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Washington D.C. will be the first to gain access to the service. MachineQ uses low-power wide-area network technology based on the LoRaWAN protocol, and will be available to businesses and municipal organizations, the company reports. Comcast says the service will help those entities collect and analyze data from connected devices to make better decisions.
“We believe that Comcast has a unique opportunity to leverage our existing network assets and Semtech’s LoRa technology, to fuel IoT innovation with disruptive new business models and smarter cities,” Alex Khorram, general manager of machineQ, comments. “We’ve seen excitement about a Comcast solution that is opening a whole new world of use cases that were previously not commercially viable due to the cost of connectivity and end devices, limited battery life, and inability to get coverage.”
Comcast indicates the aforementioned trials that took place in October in Philadelphia and San Francisco and November in Chicago helped generate early interest from organizations in a number of different verticals. Those include entities in healthcare seeking patient monitoring and laboratory sciences tracking, public utilities for metering, automotive for asset tracking and telemetry, and smart cities for lighting, waste management, and grid monitoring solutions, the company says.
