Electrical Substation Monitoring

Disruption in the IoT Industry > Mission Critical IoT

31/03/2018

Radio Data Networks; a Disruptive Technology and Business Model for the IoT Sector with its Mission Critical IoT & Telemetry Solutions

When it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), Radio Data Networks prides itself as pushing the boundaries and challenging the status quo in the market. In other words, being highly disruptive, both with our Mission Critical IoT Technology and in our Service Strategy.

Disruptive Force No 1: Mission Critical IoT on protected radio spectrum: If data is worth collecting, then why are so many taking the risk using un-protected, free-for-all radio spectrum?

Radiocommunications is where we are most disruptive. We do not believe in sharing and taking risks with client’s important data. Unfortunately, the majority of IoT players do! Many are unaware that LoRa, Sigfox, Zigbee, BLE and the majority of IoT technologies share the same radio spectrum as toys, games, drones and high-power RFID readers. Factually, license-free radios are unprotected, so if jammed or interfered with, nothing can be done. Further, the intercepting of messages on a license-free radio spectrum and the broadcast of spoof messages is not an offence either.

Gateways that deliver data over the Mission Critical Tetra Networks

We have created Mission Critical IoT and Telemetry which operates exclusively on a Licensed Radio Spectrum and/or Secure Back-Hall Carriers such as Mobitex, Tetra, PMR and DMR. Those of you familiar with the strict licensing regulations will understand that interference with or even attempting to listen to our data on a licensed channel is a criminal offence, hence we can justifiably say our services are protected in law.

Disruptive Force No 2: Knowledge and experience to deliver bespoke Mission Critical IoT Solutions, from the Smart Sensors through, enclosures to Real-Time Control Systems.

Have you ever stopped to count how many companies are involved in the delivery of the average IoT solution? If not, you will be surprised and perhaps horrified when you consider who to blame when things go wrong! No wonder you will struggle to get a Service Level Agreement (SLA) out of an IoT vendor. Further, how many of their staff have the skills to understand the processes they are monitoring too? We have staff with decades of hands-on experience across the utility sectors from Power, Highways, Rail through to Water and the Environment. Not only do we have experience in the applications, but also in the essential processes required to engineer solutions from battery management, ATEX, through to the design of injection moulding tools.

 

Further, with our business model, we offer total control and a single point of contact as we can manage and control everything from the sensor to the screen.

Disruptive Force No 3: Wherever possible, we send data via our Gateways directly to the customer’s existing Telemetry and SCADA, not a remote distant cloud/server.

That’s what we currently do for over 95% of our customers, both in the UK and across Europe, in particular those from the Utility and Regulatory sectors. Currently collectively we deliver over 200-million messages per annum, mainly concerning the status of sewers, water levels and pollution.

We strongly believe that customers should be able to use what they have (sweat their assets) and not forced to pay for hosting and to adapt to a new system for the sake of IoT, IoT vendors should adapt as we do to facilitate existing customer practices and systems.

Disruptive Force No 4: Avoiding BIG data. We believe Lean Data is beautiful and have pioneered the use of Binary Smart Sensors.

Lean Data is king when it comes to power consumption, data communications efficiency and the ease of integration to create Real-Time Control and to interface with legacy systems. Engineers will appreciate that the longer a message, the greater the probability of errors, the more energy required to deliver the message (reduced battery life), the greater the bandwidth needed, thus also increasing congestion and the risk of lost messages due to overlap and clashing.

Our Multi-Award Winning FDT Converts Flow into Flow/No-Flow Binary Data

Finally, if an instant decision is important, then make that decision at the sensor or in the field to enable autonomous control. Certainly, report the outcome, but please do not place a communications path that you have no control over, in the way of a critical process control loop and decision.

Disruptive Force No 5: Customer empowerment and field Testabilty

How many of you have experienced the situation when you pop a SIM card into a IoT device and nothing happens! There is no way to easily know if it is the device that is faulty, the network coverage, the configuration or the SIM card; totally and utterly frustrating, you would agree!

Understanding how frustrating this can be and that time is money especially when for example you have a road closed for the installation of a monitoring system, we have made Testability a key function of our Mission Critical IoT Technology. We equip our customers / service teams with simple handheld tools that give instant 24/7 status at the press of a button. This enables them to solve the vast majority of issues and/or to verify an installation in a field without having to cross fingers and wait for the following morning, only to find out it’s not working.

Disruptive Force No 6: No Internet Connectivity to Assure Cyber Security via Mission Critical IoT

Not a day goes by without stories of Cybercrime and denial of Service Attacks. It is a growing problem that has already undermined the credibility of IoT in the eyes of many business sectors.

Our solution is simple; Our Mission Critical IoT doesn’t use the Internet and further, there is no reverse channel back through the network to the sensors, so they simply cannot be hacked by a schoolboy sitting in Boston.

Many IoT solutions are rigidly restricted to the maximum number of messages that customers are permitted to send (no guarantee of delivery), for example Sigfox is 140 messages and LoRa circa 84 messages per day.

As we own our own spectrum, we do not impose fixed-duty constraints and can tailor the delivery to match the needs of the application. In some instances, we have highly critical systems that deliver messages as frequent as once per 10-seconds (8640 per day) and our norm is one per five minutes (288 per day). This means that within a typical +/- 2.5-minute window you know if your system / sensor is working. In all cases, we have the ability to send additional messages upon state-change or in alarm.

So why not find out more about our unique proposition and visit us on stand J46 at this years Utility Week Live where Disruption should be expected.

RDN Press Office 7th March 2018