Semtech Corporation announced that Kiwi Technology is using Semtech's LoRa® devices for its new third party class B Network Control Unit (NCU) that connects gas meters via the LoRaWAN® standard. Due to low power consumption and bidirectional communication capabilities of LoRa, the NCUs are fully autonomous for up to 10 years. The recently deployed NCUs remotely read indoor and outdoor gas meters and communicate data to a top tier Japanese gas utility company.

Prior to the deployment and infrastructure upgrade by Kiwi Technology, this utility provider had only one measurement data point each month, obtained from a manual field process. The new NCU system and Kiwi Technology's comprehensive gateway products utilizing LoRaWAN enable multiple, remote meter reads per day and allows customers access to their real-time and historical gas consumption trends to identify cost savings and waste reduction opportunities. Kiwi Technology's end-to-end smart gas solutions with wireless communication with LoRaWAN connectivity also ensure gas supply and infrastructure safety.

The solution helps to quickly detect and send alerts about potential methane leaks, equipment malfunctions or breakdowns. The NCU anticipates and remotely shuts off gas in potentially dangerous situations before a failure or automatically when a hazard, such as a typhoon or earthquake, occurs. Semtech's LoRa chip-to-Cloud platform is a globally adopted long range, low power solution for IoT applications, enabling the rapid development and deployment of ultra-low power, cost efficient and long range IoT networks, gateways, sensors, module products, and IoT services worldwide.

Semtech's LoRa technology provides the communication layer for the LoRaWAN® standard, which is maintained by the LoRa Alliance®, an open IoT alliance for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) applications that has been used to deploy IoT networks in over 170 countries. With the proliferation of LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN standard, the LoRa Developer Portal is a place to learn, connect, collaborate, and find resources to help accelerate your LoRa development process. Semtech is a founding member of the LoRa Alliance.