Low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) is an IoT communications technology that enables small data transfers over long distances with minimal power consumption. To do this, it leverages the natural qualities of low-frequency radio communications, which require low power to be produced, travel over extended distances, and propagate through obstructions such as buildings and other terrestrial obstacles. Because the data transfers supported by LPWAN are small, it is limited to applications such as sensors and trackers, rather than enabling applications such as video streaming or connected automobiles.

LPWAN providers offer network-as-a-service IoT connectivity solutions, managing the network stack on the customer’s behalf and providing widespread geographical coverage. As long as the provider has coverage within the required areas, a customer deploying an IoT solution would only need to purchase suitable connected devices and onboard them onto the provider’s network. The LPWAN provider will supply customers with a portal that reports on the data collected by the sensors as well as the option to forward the sensor data to the customer’s applications or cloud environments.

LPWANs can operate in either the licensed or unlicensed spectrum. To communicate in the licensed frequencies, network providers need to have purchased the right from the relevant telecommunications regulator, which is typically expensive and poses a high entry barrier, so is almost exclusively available to large mobile network operators (MNOs).

For this report, we are looking at LPWAN providers in the unlicensed spectrum, who operate in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands that can be used by anybody without the need to purchase spectrum licenses.

According to Solo.io, Gloo Mesh is a critical component of the Gloo API Infrastructure Platform, providing a modern approach to API management and accelerating innovation across distributed cloud workloads and environments. Additionally, Gloo Mesh Enterprise includes the Istio-based Gloo Mesh Gateway and/or integrates with the Envoy Proxy-based Gloo Edge API Gateway for end-to-end encryption, security, and traffic control. This incorporates traffic management into both east-west and north-south data transfer flows.

An enhanced version of open-source Istio (as opposed to a fork), Gloo Mesh Enterprise also includes an extended version of the Envoy Proxy. This enables the consistent configuration and orchestration of services across multiple VMs, clusters, clouds, and data centers from a single point of control. Focusing on ease of use, Gloo Mesh Enterprise validates upstream Istio software and incorporates built-in best practices—including role-based APIs—for extensibility and security .

Gloo Mesh is designed to simplify the operations and lifecycle management of multi-cloud, multi-mesh environments, providing both graphical and command-line UIs, multi-cluster observability, and debugging tools.

While the community supports the open-source version of Gloo Mesh, Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides production and long-term support (LTS) with patches and backported hotfixes for the last five releases (N-4) of validated upstream Istio implementations with dedicated SLAs. In addition to traditional support channels, Solo.io also provides a Slack-based support channel for customers…

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Chris Grundemann

Creative BizTech & TechBiz Consultant

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