Samsung’s Next IoT Push Is To Build A National Grid Of Smart Cities With LoRaWAN-Based Network

There are two things that Samsung really wants: to be one of the first to deploy a city-wide IoT infrastructure, as well as make sure that IoT infrastructure is on its home turf, in South Korea. That will soon be happening, and it's sure to be one of the first of what will become many such roll-outs over time.

For its first deployment, Samsung is going to be using a LoRaWAN-based network (Long-range Wide Area Network), which will utilize a 900MHz band. The first city to be affected by this will be Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city. While many reading this probably thought the first city would be Seoul (which has a population five-fold that of Daegu), it's likely Samsung's goal to start with a smaller city in order to make the even larger roll-outs more successful. It'd be hard to fault that logic.

Samsung's first IoT network in Daegu will focus on serving the infrastructure for renewable energy solutions, cloud platforms, and big data analytics of healthcare and medical services. Perhaps most exciting, or at least interesting, this network will also cater to electric vehicles, and in particular, autonomous ones.

Samsung anticipates that its LoRaWAN network in Daegu will launch next month, and become available nationwide by the middle of the year. This is one of those rarer times where we won't have to wait years to see the fruits of some company's labor. First, South Korea, next, the U.S.? It's bound to happen, although it's unclear if Samsung will be the company behind it.