With a strong growth of 30% in its third quarter and a turnover of 103,8 M€ until now (24% increase from last year), Archos’ future looks promising.

The company has just announced the launch of its new product, PicoWAN, whose aim is to become the first LP-WAN ( Low Power- Wide Area Network) RF network for connected objects, which will be global, collaborative and at a very low price.

As Henri Crohas, founder of Archos, currently chairman of its board of directors and the man behind the creation of PicoWan, explains in the video below, the secret to its innovation are the pico-gateways. The pico-gateways, which come in the form of smart plugs connected to the internet via WiFi or Ethernet, can be placed, with very low cost and easy installation, inside buildings, creating a unique wireless communication network that can be densified at will and made fail-safe and resulting in a much higher Quality of Service.

Equipped with LoRa™ chips, pico-gateways are potentially as sophisticated as antennas installed on the roofs by telcos.

Furthermore, the cost of a pico-gateway is approximately 100 times less than the cost of a regular rooftop antenna. Instead of investing tens of million euros in infrastructure, PicoWAN will create a highly competitive LP-WAN (Low- Power Wide Area Network), thanks to the diffusion of very low-cost pico-gateways. To ensure the deployment of a global network throughout Europe, PicoWAN is going to distribute up to 200,000 free pico-gateways by the end of next year.

Afterwards, subscription plans will start as low as € 0,50 per year per connected object. With those who will deploy pico-gateways locally, PicoWAN will share 50% of the profits resulting from the connections passing through their pico-gateways.

The PicoWAN software embedded in the connected objects will be open source, to make it easy to any actor in the B2B or B2C market to operate its own IoT network. This technology will facilitate the launch of multiple connected objects in all domains (health, agriculture, home automation, industry, and more), instantly supported by the PicoWAN network anywhere. All LoRaWAN objects will also integrate PicoWAN network.

PicoWan will be deployed in Europe in June 2016. Join Archos at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, 2016 for a demonstration of PicoWAN network.