Advanced Hybrid PLC – Wireless for IoT/M2M

February 24, 2016 — gridComm, a provider of the world’s most reliable and robust narrow-band power line communications (PLC) solutions that enable the transformation of traditional power grid into a smart grid, and Virtual Extension, a leader in high-performance wireless mesh networks for IoT/M2M and DALI, today announced a partnership for providing the industry with the most advanced hybrid connectivity solution of high-performance wireless mesh and narrow-band PLC networks
Virtual Extension and gridComm announce a partnership to leverage the best solutions of each company, to compensate for each technology limitation. The solution will synergetically increase the cost efficiency, reduce the time to market and even enable a whole new range of projects that couldn’t have been possible otherwise in the Internet of Things/M2M reign. The applications that will benefit from it are within smart lighting control, smart metering, smart agriculture, smart city, smart water management, environmental monitoring, medical, security and safety industries and more. Being able to provide long-term smart solutions to businesses both small and large has always been of importance to both companies, and the partnership makes good business sense as well as it helps both companies to engage users at new levels. The joint R&D is supported and co-funded via the Singapore-Israel Industrial Research and Development Foundation (SIIRD).
“Our wireless extension for DALI and IoT networks have already proven to be extremely successful in citywide streetlights deployment and industrial lighting control, as well as in smart metering and a large variety of applications that need to be high-performance and yet cost-effective. Adding PLC connectivity, such as for improving the communication in an underground basement, further increases their usefulness for our customers, as well as our company expansion into new markets” said Yariv Oren, CEO of Virtual Extension.
With 3 families of products that enable replacing the wiring in DALI by wireless, integrating DALI with IoT or using pure IoT, Virtual Extension offers today the largest variety of high-performance solutions for lighting control to be used in highway, street and professional lighting control. All the solutions are based on Virtual Extension wireless mesh technology –VEmesh, which employs space, time and frequency diversity, to offer the highest available performance in terms of high robustness and resiliency, practically unlimited number of nodes per network, low and deterministic latency, easy of deployment and maintenance and ultimately cost-effectiveness. The same VEmesh technology is used also in a wide range of products in smart metering and applications in need of such high-performance, with most of these applications capable to benefit from the additional connectivity offered by gridComm PLC technology.
Leveraging its multi-channel frequency technologies in its GC2200 PHY transceiver IC, gridComm has developed a fully adaptable, self-configuring network solution, GC-Net, that enables the world’s most reliable power line communications solution. With an additional wireless PHY channel enabled by Virtual Extension’s market proven VEmesh technology, the combination can now provide a truly hybrid network solution that enables seamless and reliable communications amongst wired, wireless and hybrid wired-wireless nodes within a unified network.
No longer is the need to manage different networks separately provided by different communication technologies which adds to complexities and overheads in the systems. This brings upon huge benefits such as a common set of commands and network IDs can now be used to address and control wired, wireless and hybrid wired-wireless nodes.
“We are very encouraged and thankful to SIIRD’ support for enabling gridComm and Virtual Extension to develop the cutting-edge technology of hybrid PLC and Wireless. We foresee that this technology would tremendously reduce meter installation and maintenance costs through automatic configuration of PLC and Wireless channels enabling robust and reliable sustained communications in noisy environments. This technology will also enable our customer to connect wireless sensors such as weather sensor, light sensor and motion sensor to our smart street light system effortlessly. This will truly enable the realization of a Smart City,” noted Mike Holt, CEO of gridComm.
“SIIRD is happy to witness and fund the collaboration between Virtual Extension and gridComm to develop the state-of-the-art technology. The main role of SIIRD is to identify and help promising technology companies from both countries to jointly develop industrial projects that can be commercialized and are beneficial to the industry,” said Chan Eng Chye, GM of SIIRD.
For more information, Visit our website: http://www.virtual-extension.com/

From streetlighting control, through smart metering to geofencing, we are committed to providing the highest performance wireless mesh network solutions for today’s smart lighting control and IoT challenges.

Founded in 2000, Virtual Extension is a privately owned company.

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Beit Dagan, 502 00 02
Israel
Tel: +972-3-732-1207

This release was published on openPR.