Universal IoT gateway merges smart home, commercial building support via LoRaWan

In addition to LoRaWan, the LEXI gateway supports all other major wireless protocols including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and Z-Wave, and is upgradable to Thread and Matter.

Matt Vincent

Feb. 3, 2023

LEXI, developer of a transformative IoT platform aimed at both enterprises and consumers seeking to manage and automate smart spaces, announced that the LEXI IoT Gateway with support for LoRaWan is now shipping to customers.

Adding LoRaWan to the universal LEXI platform multiplies market potential by bringing together smart home and commercial building technologies into one multi-protocol gateway, contends the manufacturer.

As noted by the company, the LoraWan standard, as developed and maintained by the LoRa Alliance, was specifically designed for large-scale IoT communication. As a “long-range wide area network,” the technology addresses the need to transmit signals across vast distances, through physical barriers such as concrete, while running on low power, and also meets the requirements of ensuring long battery life, with the ability to massively scale at a low deployment and operating cost.

Scott Cahill CEO of LEXI, remarked:

“Despite difficult global headwinds, the IoT universe continues to progress, and interoperability is more important than ever as organizations look to solve challenges with intelligence and efficiency. Hitting this milestone around shipping our universal gateway featuring the reach and resilience of LoRaWan demonstrates our commitment to helping businesses support smart technologies literally near and far, today and tomorrow, under the cover of an ecosystem that can handle it all.”

Comprehensive platform covers both smart home, commercial IoT

Earlier this year, LEXI announced a novel suite of software and hardware that provides complete functionality for enterprise customers interested in deploying widespread smart home offerings or commercial IoT projects.

As contended by a press release, “The future-ready design of the LEXI IoT Platform is what differentiates it from everything else on the market. In addition to LoRaWan, the LEXI gateway supports all other major wireless protocols including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and Z-Wave – and is upgradable to Thread and Matter.”

Billed as fully interoperable with leading IoT products/brands, the LEXI IoT Platform boasts multilayered network security and the power to run AI models at the edge. The platform is comprised of three core components:

  • LEXI Mobile Apps: Customizable, white-label iOS and Android mobile apps to add, control and manage devices. Works both with and without the LEXI Universal IoT Gateway.
  • Universal IoT Gateway: Includes support for the four key IoT wireless protocols, now with LoRa, plus a powerful NXP processor to run AI models at the edge.
  • LEXI Cloud: U.S.-based cloud includes an admin portal, customer service portal, Roles-Based Access Control (RBAC), fleet management, remove device control, a Big Data backend, a commercial LoRa server and rich reporting & analytics dashboards.

John E. Osborne II, COO of LEXI who also serves as chairman emeritus of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), as well as vice chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance, concluded:

“The LoRa standard opens avenues of opportunity around smart living, working, and connecting across short, long and challenging ranges. Our customers are assured they are hitching their brand to a flexible, future-proof IoT platform that can cast ‘nets’ of varying size and power depending on their use case. Having this protocol on tap provides the flexibility to communicate broadly across homes, buildings, cities, logistics, agriculture and beyond.”

Learn more about the platform.