London's Weightless-N network goes live

The Weightless SIG, in conjunction with the Digital Catapult, has announced the deployment of a Weightless-N Smart City network for London. Operating in the licence-exempt, sub-GHz ISM spectrum using ultra narrow band technology, Weightless-N is said to have a range of several kilometres, even in urban environments.


"We are delighted to be able to provide a platform to showcase Weightless-N technology, a key enabler for Smart City projects not just across the capital but around the world," Peter Karney, Digital Catapult's head of engineering, said. "We are looking forward to opening this up to our network to enable them to continue to showcase the UK's innovation in this area."

Network modelling predicts coverage encompassing well known London landmarks. Independent real world signal verification will be carried out soon to provide an accurate coverage map which will be published on the Weightless website when complete.

Weightless-N supports frequency hopping to provide interference tolerance, mobility support and security. It provides encryption and authentication using a shared secret key regime to encode transmitted information via a 128bit AES algorithm. The technology automatically routes terminal messages to the correct destination.