Steve Rogerson asks Dustin Steinoff from Digi about why his company is backing the Wi-Sun standard.

LoRa has for a while been considered an, if not the, ideal standard for connecting IoT devices over a large area. As its name indicates, its whole purpose was low power devices over long distances.

This made it a fitting option for citywide deployments and it has become a linchpin in many smart city developments. However, smart cities have, as is their nature, been growing piecemeal, meaning there are many disconnected systems whether it be traffic lights not talking with sensors, energy meters that cannot share data, and security cameras that operate in silos.

The result can be unreliable services, inefficiencies that frustrate residents, and massive maintenance costs that undermine budgets.

What is needed is something to bring all this together, an open standard that can network devices and sensors from unrelated systems. Some feel that LoRa just can’t cut it, mainly due to its bandwidth limitations. As such, some big players in the industry are looking at Wi-Sun as an alternative with predictions it could really take off for smart city use within the next two years.

Now hang on. Wi-Sun is not new; it has been around for well over a decade and has been seen as a useful method for connecting smart meters and the like. Some large utilities have backed it since the start. But there is a big jump from that to becoming the backbone of a smart city.

The difference now is it has some serious backing to move up the ladder with the likes of Cisco giving it support, and, more recently, IoT connectivity provider Digi adding Wi-Sun support to its XBee line of wireless connectivity modules (www.iotm2mcouncil.org/iot-library/news/iot-newsdesk/digi-enables-mesh-networking-at-scale-with-wi-sun/).

Curious about this, I had a chat with Digi vice president Dustin Steinoff, and was pleasantly surprised to find a man really enthusiastic about the role Wi-Sun is going to play in smart cities, and we are talking about soon.

“We believe Wi-Sun will drive smart cities,” he said. “We are seeing it in India, we are seeing it in Brazil, we are seeing it everywhere. There are so many difficulties today and everyone has their own ideas. We believe Wi-Sun will unify them.”

Wi-Sun is, as said, in the metering space and Dustin is seeing it move into renewable energy areas and EV charging. Street and building lighting applications, though, are the big ones and Wi-Sun is now being adopted for these.

“New technologies can often be slow to be adopted but, with backing from Cisco and others, there is a lot of momentum,” he said. “This will be fast adoption. I see it competing with LoRa. There is still a need for LoRa. If you need low throughput, LoRa will still be there. Both LoRa and Wi-Sun will be important in the smart city infrastructure.”

He said Wi-Sun also had advantages over LoRa in being easier to install and more secure. As such, he said there was growing interest in the standard across many verticals, including building automation and access control. He said Digi was also working with a customer on enabling video over Wi-Sun.

Though still in its early stages at Digi, Wi-Sun could be less than a year before it starts to take off and he said the firm was working with large customers in the smart city and infrastructure fields and saw these coming to fruition in 12 to 18 months.

So why is Digi (www.digi.com) betting on Wi-Sun (wi-sun.org)?

“The interoperability of an open standard versus a closed standard,” Dustin replied. “It is a self-healing mesh network. It has enterprise-grade security. We believe it will support multiple smart-city applications such as street lighting, utility metering, public safety and emergency response systems. We believe it will really take off; it is what we are betting on.”

And with backing also coming from the likes of Renesas, Silicon Labs and others, he could be right.