Samsung Electronics announced a new contract with SK Telecom to deploy the first commercial Internet of Things (IoT)-dedicated LoRaWAN network in South Korea. The network will be deployed across Korea using the 900 MHz frequency band. The commercial service is scheduled to launch in Daegu, Korea’s fourth largest city, next month and will be available across the Asian country by the middle of this year.

Daegu will serve as a test bed for the IoT network, and focus on setting up and adopting infrastructure for renewable energy solutions, cloud platforms and big data analytics of healthcare and medical services, as well as electric vehicle infrastructure for autonomous cars. For example, streetlights in the city will collect weather and traffic information using IoT sensors, enabling cost savings by automatically adjusting the lighting level and also sending air pollution status information.

LoRaWAN IoT networks use an unlicensed, public spectrum called the Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency band. To prevent degradation of other industrial communications already using the ISM band, the network will support the Listen Before Talk (LBT) function. A new service model, the Internet of Small Things (IoST), will also be introduced as a key facilitator for more business opportunities utilizing the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) like LoRaWAN. LPWAN is a group of technologies optimized to transmit small amounts of data at very low speeds of below 5Kbps.