Hi Everyone,

I’m Bryan. I just recently joined the FOAM team. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is talking to you all on this forum! Seeing such thoughtful discourse is really a breath of fresh air for the blockchain space.

For starters I thought I would share this article I came across which is a decent overview of the future role of IoT in geolocation, and specifically how Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) fit in. Some interesting points it mentions:

There really is a preexisting painpoint for logistics-based industries around asset tracking and management. IoT tracking tech is already being used to help locate objects like shipping containers, but it fails in the same way that many other traditional IoT devices fail. Not only is it relatively insecure, but also has poor battery life. Imagine having to deal with the headache that is manually recharging the batteries on 10,000 shipping containers across an entire shipping port every month…

In some cases, trackers are located in hard-to-reach areas especially when mounted on railroad cars, or in oil and gas rigs, which make it very costly to replace batteries—especially if there are hundreds of thousands of trackers deployed in the field.

For now, at least, humans do battery replacement. It’s one of the dominating OPEX factors in the Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO) of the whole IoT solution. These replacement costs actually made it difficult to justify the mass adoption of conventional geolocation solutions in the logistics sector.

A likely scenario to rise in the future will be a diversified suite of IoT and connectivity technologies driving a single use case like shipping logistics. For power consumption-heavy indoor use, maybe bluetooth will bare the blunt of this work. But for outdoor, remote use, a more efficient system like LoRa would come into play.

These systems will need to talk to each other though, which is something I thought the article didn’t go far enough in explaining. Even for walled garden solutions, the real crowning achievement of a asset tracking system won’t be good battery life – it’ll be better security and accuracy of geolocational data.

cough cough

Sounds like something FOAM might be good at handling!

Would love to hear all of your thoughts.

Great to be here,

Bryan