Actility acquires Abeeway for greater IoT location services

Actility, an IoT and M2M solutions provider, has acquired geolocation system specialist Abeeway with the aim to provide a best in class portfolio of IoT location services to support service providers and solution vendors across a wide range of industry sectors.

Abeeway, already a market leader in tracking devices, offers on-demand geolocation, movement alerts or geofencing that use GPS signals to determine their location, but energy-efficient LoRaWAN communication to pass that location to a tracking application. Hence, in comparison with trackers using cellular networks, they offer much longer battery life.

The key innovation developed by Abeeway, providing a powerful competitive advantage to Actility location services, is an assisted GPS technology specifically optimised for LoRaWAN, which allows fewer satellites to be used for a fix and reduces the GPS lock time to a few seconds. The power required for both GPS signal acquisition and processing is reduced: this combination results in a dramatic increase in battery life, by an order of magnitude versus existing GPS location technology.

ThingPark Location services will be accessible through APIs – when combined with the bidirectional capability of the LoRaWAN link – will allow developers to manage geolocation according to the needs of their application.

Olivier Hersent, Actility founder and CTO, said: “The unique advantage of our platform is its ability to serve a huge variety of use cases by combining different location technologies including network-based TDoA location, GPS and A-GPS, Bluetooth beacons and wi-fi ‘sniffing.’”