The National Narrowband Network Co (NNNCo) and New Zealand’s Spark NZ have entered into an inter-carrier agreement to enable roaming across their respective LoRaWAN IoT networks.
The agreement allows mutual access across both carriers’ respective LoRaWAN IoT (Long-Range Wide Area Internet of Things) networks, making it possible for businesses on both sides of the Tasman to deploy LoRaWAN devices for any IoT application without needing to set up operations in the other country.
“As the economy continues to be shaped by COVID-19, we could expect to see more partnerships like this, where carriers and partners work together to enable the deployment and scaling of IoT solutions across markets,” said Spark IoT lead Tony Agar. “If we have a customer who wants to deliver services in Australia, they can now do so from the comfort of their offices in Aotearoa, without the need to set up operations across the Tasman. It also means that they can keep visibility and monitor their machinery, assets or infrastructure using their already well-established dashboards and diagnostic tools.”
The new wholesale arrangement has been enabled with the integration of NNNCo’s enterprise data platform N2N-DL into Spark NZ’s network core.
Data from devices on the Spark NZ network will feed into N2N-DL giving customers access to data on a single platform from devices enrolled in either country. Spark can also do the same for customers with devices enrolled on the NNNCo network in Australia.
Australasia’s fastest-growing parking app Parkable – a Spark NZ customer – said the agreement would help to expand their business in Australia.
“Due to customer demand we want to push harder into the Australian market so this agreement will allow us to scale our Parkable offering across the Tasman and simplify our backend processes. Using the one platform and having a single place to view and analyse data will mean our customers will get even better parking experiences in the future,” said Parkable co-founder and CEO, Toby Littin.
“It’s exciting to know that we now have access to growing network coverage in Sydney, Canberra, Gold Coast, Tasmania, Melbourne and regional areas in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Those markets have just been unlocked for us, so we are eager to grow and scale,” he added.
NNNCo CEO Rob Zagarella said: “We’re seeing increasing demand from enterprise customers requiring cross-Tasman roaming capabilities as they deploy IoT devices and applications beyond Australia. We’re very happy to now be able to provide a seamless and consistent service with N2N-DLas a customer’s single source of aggregation for IoT devices in either country or on either network.”
NNNCo plans to strike similar arrangements with other international LoRaWAN carriers.
