Delivering Reliable Long Range Connectivity for Low Power Wide Area solutions: Senet

“Headquartered in New Hampshire, USA, Senet is currently focused on the North American market and has over 125,000 square miles of network coverage.”

Low Power Wide Area Networks are the key to unlock the enormous potential of IoT solutions. Leading analysts studying the IoT/M2M market claim that LPWA networks will address over half of the total IoT connectivity market. Founded in 2009, Senet, given its years of experience in network deployments, is well positioned to capture a significant percentage of that available market.

Senet provides the first public Low Power Wide Area Network for the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) market in North America. Low cost, low-power and secure, the Senet Network has distinct advantages over cellular, WiFi, and other emerging connectivity technologies for the IoT market. The company is able to build additional network coverage within two to three months of customer requirements.

Competitors of Senet include existing networks (e.g. cellular), future technologies (e.g. LTE-M, NB-IoT), and other vendors of LPWA networks. The company differentiates itself from its competitors such as Sigfox and Ingenu in two key areas: 1) It is based on LoRa® technology which is based on an open protocol specification, and 2) Senet has the largest, existing deployment running a revenue-generating application.

The Senet Story
Senet was originally founded in 2009 as EnerTrac, which is a heating fuel delivery automation solution leveraging IoT/M2M technology. Customers of the solution are heating fuel dealers and distributors, including farming cooperatives. Dealers typically see 30% in annual cost savings due to the operational efficiencies gained by being able to optimally plan deliveries. The original application was built on a proprietary network.

Late in 2014, EnerTrac re-launched the company under the Senet brand with the mission to focus on providing a public Network as a Service platform for IoT/M2M applications and solutions. Following extensive study of the various Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) Network technologies, Senet selected LoRa® as the best overall solution. In early 2015, the company joined the LoRa® Alliance as a contributing member. The LoRa® Alliance has grown rapidly to over 250 members in 13 months and has proposed a global, open standard MAC protocol called LoRaWAN.
By the end of April 2016, the Senet Network will have grown to over 125,000 square miles of coverage, collecting data from over 35,000 end nodes, and operating on over 125 sites across the US. While dozens of new sensor-based solutions are being developed and tested on the Senet Network, the primary revenue-generating application is currently EnerTrac. Senet is the first and only public provider in North America of LPWA Networks with class leading LoRa® modulation for IoT/M2M applications.

Changing the Connectivity Paradigm
When it comes to Senet’s connectivity solutions, there are two important dimensions to consider: the Senet Network and the EnerTrac application. Attracting new tenants and assisting the growth of existing tenants of the public Senet Network is the company’s main objective.

EnerTrac remains to be a fantastic proof point of the value of a LPWA network since it provides low total solution cost, long range connectivity (>15 miles rural), and low power (>10-year battery life) device enablement. EnerTrac also demonstrates a rapid and easy to understand ROI. IoT is a nascent market and there are new solutions and new companies being created regularly that are inventing valuable new applications to leverage the benefits of LPWA networks.
In addition to the LPWA network benefits listed above, Senet’s LoRa® based network offers bidirectional communication, mobile device support, adaptive data rate support, and strong, built-in security features using AES-128 CCM. Senet feels strongly that the benefits of an open standards based network are critical to building a competitive and rich ecosystem of IoT solutions.

Market Verticals and Key Customers
Virtually all market verticals have the ability to leverage the benefits of LPWA networks for IoT connectivity for applications with low data rate requirements. To this point, the sectors showing the most progress in building IoT solutions include oil and gas, smart city, building management, water metering, smart grid, supply chain, and smart agriculture. Keeping in mind that EnerTrac remains Senet’s most deployed application, the largest customers are fuel dealers such as JS West, Proulx, and MFA (Missouri Farmers Association).

Customer Speaks
“We have been doing telemetry tank monitoring for many years albeit only on less than 1% of our tanks because the cost was just too high. When we discovered EnerTrac we were intrigued about its potential because their pricing allowed us to automate a very large number of our tanks.” – Jim Proulx, President – Proulx Oil & Propane

Current and Future Milestones
The current focus for the company is to build out the Senet Network based on real customer demand. Today, the network expansion is being funded primarily by the EnerTrac application. In parallel, Senet is aggressively pursuing adjacent applications that will leverage the strengths of its expanding LPWA network. Senet has a proven network that reaches over 125,000 square miles in the US, with coverage in the Northeast (New England and New York), significant parts of the Midwest (mainly in Iowa and Missouri), and California (San Francisco Bay area and the Central Valley). Future plans include the addition of new urban centers in the US and expansion into Canada and Mexico.

Meet the CEO – George Dannecker
George brings more than 35 years of multinational management experience in the technology sector to Senet as its CEO. He has held management positions of increasing responsibility with Acme Electric Corporation, Gould, Inc. and Aavid Thermalloy, and was cofounder of Concord Communications and Teraconnect. He founded Vette Corp. and Coolcentric which became global leaders in the field of electronic thermal management with global sales and manufacturing operations in North America and China. Prior to founding Vette Corp, Dannecker was founder, CEO and president of TeraConnect, Inc. a venture-funded spinout from Lockheed Martin, commercializing optical transceivers used in telecommunications and data communications. George was also President and COO of Aavid Thermalloy, where he globalized manufacturing, expanding operations into England, Singapore, Taiwan and China and achieved revenues of more than $250 million. He joined Senet in 2013.

“Our network delivers long range coverage, reception, battery life, capacity, reliability, and security. Most important, its unprecedented low cost enables developers to create applications that were previously cost prohibitive.” Senet