Trilliant Acquires Ingenu's Smart Grid Assets, Signs RPMA LPWAN Deal

Trilliant has signed a deal to acquire Ingenu’s smart grid application business and customers, as well as licensing Ingenu’s RPMA LPWAN technology to integrate it into the Trilliant Smart Communications Platform – which is aimed at utilities and smart city customers.

The deal will see Ingenu continue to develop and support the smart grid network infrastructure and applications that use its Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA) technology, so that Trilliant can continue to focus on its core business – of providing its UnitySuite centralized communication and application platform that utilities and smart city operators will use to manage their assets.

For Ingenu, this looks like a strategic move to streamline its operations – offloading the smart grid AMI customers to focus on developing its Machine Network initiative, which will see the company build out a public RPMA network. For Trilliant, RPMA is simply another option that it can sell to its customers, adding to the cellular, power line communication (PLC), and RF mesh options it already provides – including Wi-SUN (see separate article).

Formerly called On-Ramp Wireless, until a rebrand in September, Ingenu’s current network footprint covers around 50,000 square-miles in the US. Although it currently has around 35 deployments globally, that’s only a fraction of the total 3.8m square-mile landmass, and that’s where the Machine Network strategy comes in. Building out overage should ensure more potential customers, and Dallas and Phoenix are the first cities that will be catered for.

Trilliant’s UnitySuite, the cloud dashboard that it provides to customers, will hope to snare new customers with RPMA. Announced this week was a deal with NEW Netz in Germany – a utility with around half a million customers. No specific communications protocol was announced in the release, but RPMA adds a pretty capable option to the connectivity portfolio that Trilliant can offer to its existing and potential customers. Ingenu, of course, receives what can be presumed to be an attractive license fee for its technology.

“With a multitude of proven worldwide deployments, Ingenu’s RPMA technology offers an extremely reliable and robust communications solution for smart grid connectivity,” said Andrew White, Trilliant’s CEO. “Our decades-long expertise in AMU and smart grid integration will provide Ingenu’s utility customers with a rich set of services and solution to manage their valuable network assets.”

Ingenu’s CEO, John Horn, told RIoT that utilities looking to create public networks will still work directly with Ingenu – a potentially lucrative option if the utility is able to successfully monetize a network’s spare capacity. He added that Ingenu will support Trilliant in the short term as it integrates RPMA into its platform, and that selling off its AMI business will allow Ingenu to focus on securing the network partnerships that will advance its Machine Network ambitions.