This is a huge deal for EpiSensor - something we've been working on for many years. In my hand below is a SONOFF temperature and humidity sensor. Sonoff are based in Shenzhen, great design, costs about $/€12 wholesale, accurate temperature and humidity, 4 year battery life on a coin cell, Zigbee comms.
Zigbee is the right tech for this job. It can report data every few seconds. High bandwidth enough to do OTA firmware updates without breaking a sweat. Responsive, couple 100ms latency, no limits on how often it can communicate. It's the perfect sensor product to use if you want to monitor comfort in a room.
But what about using it in a commercial environments? That's where the problems start. The software ecosystem that can make use of sensors like this (while also meeting super high standards of security, interoperability and reliability) is basically non-existant.
LoRaWAN took a huge amount of the attention of the IoT community over the past 10 years - but it's just not the right technology for super dense sensor networks in commercial / industrial buildings.
Let's say you're interested in monitoring a hotel or office building. You might want to look at temperature, humidity, thermostatic control, door/window state, PM2.5, CO2, occupancy and lighting (you can really make a building intelligent when you have that data for every room). That could be 8 devices with 100 feeds of data from one room (incl. sensors and configurable parameters). Imagine there are 50 rooms like that on one floor of a building and 12 floors. That's 480,000 feeds of data from ONE medium sized commercial building!
LoRaWAN is not the right tech to do that job. It is the right tech if you want to monitor a water meter at the edge of the property.
EpiSensor is doing hybrid sensor tech so you can mix and match the right wireless sensors and comms protocols for the job, and get data into enterprise software platforms super securely and reliably. EpiSensor designs and manufactures a range of sensor products for doing intelligent electricity grid and industrial stuff. But you don't have to use any of them, unless they're a good fit for your project. You can fill a building with 12 euro temp/humidity sensors and use the EpiSensor Gateway to manage them.
We have the structures to support basically every Zigbee 3.0 device so you can deploy monitoring and control systems at super low cost - combined with specialist high quality sensors when you need them - and a super powerful Gateway and enterprise grade software for managing them. Send your data to any software platform for analysis, completely open, no lock in. AND it all runs locally, no cloud required, we don't ever receive your data.
This infrastructure is fundamental to accelerating the energy transition.