Comcast will expand its enterprise Internet of Things(IoT) service, machineQ, to a dozen major U.S. markets beginning in the first part of 2018.
MachineQ is an IoT network service and platform that utilizes Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology based on the LoRaWAN protocol to build and deploy solutions for businesses and municipal organizations.
The service is slated to roll out in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington D.C.
“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,” says Alex Khorram, general manager of machineQ. “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.”
As a part of the machineQ service, Comcast is working with its commercial partners to enable businesses and cities to gather, transmit and analyze data about the operation of connected devices distributed throughout their locations. Using the service, organizations are empowered to use data collected from their IoT devices, learn from it, and make better-informed, data-based decisions to improve how they serve customers, tenants and citizens.
The company cited interest in the technology coming from a range of industries, including healthcare (patient monitoring, laboratory sciences tracking), public utilities (remote utility metering), automotive (asset tracking, telemetry) and smart cities (outdoor lighting, waste management, utility grid monitoring.)
Comcast first announced the service in October 2016 as trials in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, and expanded to Chicago in November. There are a number of emerging options to link these services. For example, T-Mobile said earlier this month that it has completed testing of Narrowband-IOT in Las Vegas and is rolling out services to the city.
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