Belgian Telco Proximus Rolls Out IoT Network With MongoDB

Proximus is one of the biggest telecom companies in the Belgian market and, like every other operator, it constantly feels the pressure to become more agile and innovative.

And this pressure means the company is pumping more resources into one specific technology hive – the Internet of Things (IoT).

Something cool

But Joke Tisaun, product manager IoT, LoRa at ‎Proximus, explains that their work on IoT is about so much more than just creating “something cool”.

“We wanted to roll out a new network that’s based on something we see happening in society,” she says. “We see that there are a lot of technology hives and one of them, the IoT, is having an impact on the personal and professional lives of everybody. And because it all comes down to connecting things or connecting people it’s super important for Proximus.”

Connecting things, she believes, is a part of Proximus’ DNA: “It’s important for every telco operator. Also, in Belgium, we see that everything now needs to be connected everywhere at every time.” In fact, in Belgium, Proximus’ customers interact with their smartphones on average 200 times per day, which highlights how important this is. There are more connected things in the world than there are people and in the coming years that will only grow.

“When we examine the growth of the IoT, we see something very interesting. Out of all those connected things, the biggest growth is expected from the objects without any SIM cards.

“Today you have smartphones, tablets and computers but the biggest growth will be with smart sensors. They don’t require a lot of battery power and can communicate over long distance. In that segment we saw huge potential for Proximus but, on the other hand, we didn’t have a network that could support those kind of sensors. That’s why we decided to roll out a Long Range (LoRa) network.”

How did Proximus handle the data? Find out on page 2…