Welcome to 'This is My Architecture: New Zealand.'
I'm Viral from AWS and joining me today we have Renee from Spark IoT.
Welcome, Renee.
Thanks Viral, thanks for having me.
Renee, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself, Spark, and Spark IoT?
Yes, absolutely.
So I work for Spark who is New Zealand's larges telecommunications and digital services provider.
A few years ago we set up a business called Spark IoT
which is really about helping our customers to get the best out of the Internet of Things,
to harness that for their businesses to create solutions to make them more productive,
more sustainable, and fit for the future.
So today we're obviously going to be talking about IoT and business transformation.
Could you tell us a little bit about the solution?
Yes, absolutely.
We've built a solution based off the LoRaWAN network.
A couple of years ago we rolled out a public LoRaWAN network,
but what we were finding was that our customers were really looking for a private solution.
So what we've done is work with the AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN
and pull together a full end-to-end managed service
that creates private LoRaWAN networks for our customers.
I have to ask...
Spark being an extensive mobile provider, why LoRaWAN?
It's a very interesting question.
LoRaWAN has got a couple of key characteristics or capabilities that really resonate with our customers.
So firstly, it is very low cost.
And so that means it's economical for our customers, and they can scale the solutions more easily.
It's low powered so it means that when you don't have ready access to power or a battery,
it works really well.
It also has significantly long range, which is great in New Zealand's geography,
up to about 15 kilometers line of site which really helps for some of those more remote use cases.
Given those benefits I'm sure it'll be easy to set up quite an expansive device farm.
What happens to all the data once that device farm is set up?
How do you get it all together?
Yeah, that's a good question.
We have a number of devices and you can have many devices that connect using LoRaWAN
through to the LoRaWAN gateway.
What then happens is it traverses over our Spark 4G network,
through into the IoT Core for LoRaWAN which is the brains of the operation.
So how does the IoT Core help?
It's very helpful in helping to reduce the development time in setting up these quite complicated networks.
It also reduces the operational burden.
So what it means is we can go from several days of set-up, or more,
down to just a couple of hours.
Awesome, so you've told us about the sensors, the gateway, the core.
What happens to the data once it gets into the core?
Well, the data is the really interesting thing in IoT.
There's a couple of things that happen.
There's a rules engine within the IoT Core that we use.
Firstly it's streamed up through Kinesis Firehose and into the S3 bucket.
The rules engine then transforms the data and sends it in one of two paths.
So, along through the Kinesis Firehose and up to our operational dashboards that we use at Spark
or down through the API gateway and out into our customers.
Awesome. So looping back to an earlier point you made,
how Spark drives their products based on customer feedback.
How is Spark driving business value out of the data that they've got through their system?
Yeah, so we derive value from data in a couple of ways
and with IoT, data is really where the value sits.
So firstly, for our operational teams,
we're creating a centralized dashboard
that our support teams can use to manage the individual accounts.
And for our customers, we're creating unique experiences.
So by moving the data through into their individual applications,
we're able to create unique experiences for each customer
that really talk to their own data and insights,
and their own business and what that business needs.
Renee, I really like the solution you shared today,
especially how it's transforming business and changing the way we work, play and live for the better.
Thank you for sharing your solution with us today.
Thanks for having me. It's been a privilege to be here just to talk through our solution.
And thank you for watching another episode of 'This is My Architecture: New Zealand.'