How LPWAN Could Change Our Lives, IoT insights with Damian Duffy, eir Head of Mobility

By @SimonCocking, interesting insights from Damian Duffy, Head of Mobility at eir, who we will be interviewing at Dublin Tech Summit as part of the panel on “How LPWAN Could Change Our Lives”

What is your background?

I studied software development but found my way into the mobile carriers. Originally in Vodafone where I worked across a range of roles from Customer Operations, Network Management and Enterprise. Within The Enterprise B2B space I’ve found solving connectivity challenges to be among the most interesting and rewarding work.

Is it a logical progression to what you do now?

M2M has been present in one form of another since I started working in mobile. It’s more recently become popular to call it IoT but I’ve been working on connecting “things” for over 14 years now.

What is your role with eir?

Head of IoT.

What aspects of IoT can we see coming soon from eir?

We’re most interested in making it easy for businesses of all sizes to get connected. I think there’s a real demand in the market for easy to access and manage wireless connectivity. We’ve been doing connectivity for years (leased lines, dialup, mobile data) but for the first time we’re specifically attacking the challenges of IoT. We launched a self-managed private networking solution for IoT last summer and we’re expanding from there. We want to get the connectivity right and look at how we can expand out from there. Right now we’re evolving that cellular connectivity platform (IoT Connect), introducing a range of general purpose cellular modems and routers for IoT projects and we’ve partnered with VT Networks to provide Sigfox (LPWA) solutions to our customers.

What are your plans for 2017?

We will continue to evolve our cellular connectivity platform to add more features and options. We’ll also be expanding our capabilities and range of solutions based on Sigfox. Another goal for this year is to build greater awareness of eir as an IoT solutions provider.

How was 2016, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

It was an extremely hectic year. We moved from design to development, testing and launch of IoT Connect in the space of 7 or 8 months which is extremely fast by carrier standards. All the while we were working with early pilot customers and building a pipeline for launch. I would have liked to have launched our Sigfox and hardware lines before Christmas but we ran out of time.

How can people find out more about what you guys are working on?

Come see us at our stand at DTS. You can also get in touch through our website www.eir.ie/business and follow us on twitter @eirBusiness

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

Q. Are LPWA and cellular solutions competing or complementary?

A: We see them as complementary. LPWA will enable a wider range of devices to get connected. Where bandwidth requirements are higher, cellular is a great option. It all depends on the use-case and what connectivity is most suitable.

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