“The article originates from the industrial research of ABI Research, a cutting-edge technology research institution, and focuses on the application of ZETA LPWA protocol development company Zongxing Technology in business development, M-FSK modulation technology, and ZETag cloud tag series products in logistics cargo tracking and packaging management. analysis, and also shared the development of ZETA technology in the commercial market and ecosystem.
Author | Tancred Taylor
Source | ABI Research
On February 1, 2021, Zongxing Technology announced that it would expand to Europe. First, Zongxing Technology has signed an exclusive national distribution agreement with IoT integrator Sensing Labs and plans to develop its regional business starting in France. In addition, the company has established a sub-alliance of the ZETA Alliance in Europe - an ecosystem designed to promote the ZETA LPWA protocol. This is the fourth sub-alliance established in Europe after China, Japan and the Southeast Asian Association. We found that this company has been highly praised in the Asia-Pacific region and has significant potential for disruption in the smart logistics and asset tracking industry.
Zongxing Technology is the company that developed the ZETA LPWA protocol, which is a long-range communication protocol that uses M-FSK modulation on the sub-GHz (or 2.4GHz) spectrum band and uses multiple ultra-narrowband channels to achieve 18-byte data packets. Ultra-low power transmission (approximately -140db) with high penetration. The protocol can run on some existing 2-FSK chips, but achieves best performance when running on proprietary SoCs that support 4-FSK, 8-FSK and 256-FSK modulation.
However, quite a bit of the "magic" is in the gateway, with a highly sensitive receiver making long-distance transmission possible (depending on the environment and receiver sensitivity, generally between 2-10 kilometers). Based on ZETA, Zongxing Technology has developed a series of its own hardware and IoT platforms for application scenarios in smart buildings, smart industries and smart logistics.
It is worth noting that Zongxing Technology provides the ZETag cloud tag series for smart logistics. There are currently 4 types of this series of tags with different shapes and battery capabilities to track various types of goods. There are two main reasons for the promotion of ZETag cloud tags in Europe: one is the complexity of the European logistics environment and interest in tracking in-transit and LTL (less than truckload) cargo, and the other is the superiority of its ZETag tracker compared to existing technologies sex. The goal of Zongxing Technology is to push asset tracking to lower power consumption and lower cost to achieve tracking of individual goods and packages.
The most interesting is the disposable ZETag cloud tag: it is a small smart tag (65x52x3mm) that uses disposable paper batteries, transmits every 30 minutes, has a lifespan of 6 months to 1 year, and has a transmission distance of up to 3 kilometers (Based on receiver sensitivity). The tag currently costs just over $1 to manufacture and is expected to be mass-produced in the future at a cost of less than $0.30, close to the cost of passive RFID tags. This technology is not just another scientific experiment: Zongxing Technology already has many large-scale practical applications. One example is the deployment of ZETag cloud tag wide area network in Guangxi with China Post and China Tower for tracking high-value B2C packages and mail. Such as government documents, passports, etc.
Smart tags are the next frontier for asset tracking in the Internet of Things. For example, Wiliot is working on large-scale item-level tracking through printable Bluetooth tags, and the pharmaceutical industry is one of several interesting application areas. Bayer's collaboration with major technology companies (Sony, ARM, Vodafone/AT&T) aims to track individual packages again using cellular technology (LTE-M/NB-IoT) and provide daily status reports as well as event-based reports ( such as package opening, excessive vibration/temperature changes); the technology began commercialization and deployment in real-life application scenarios earlier this year. Additionally, there are several projects using long-range (LoRa) tracking tags underway, but most are currently in the proof-of-concept stage.
The ZETag cloud tagging solution has several advantages. First, it consumes less energy than cellular technology and LoRa (smaller paper batteries can be used). Second, it provides high penetration capabilities (approximately -140db) for tracking items underneath metal containers or other cargo. Third, goods can be tracked while moving at high speed (the gateway can receive messages from devices moving at 120km/h, and the packet loss rate is only 5%). Fourth, tags can be reported every 30 minutes, making tracking more granular/real-time. Fifth, the cost of this solution is very low. Sixth, and most importantly, this technology has been successfully used in real-world scenarios for many years. In fact, Zongxing Technology has reached large-scale deployment (one customer has applied more than 500,000 ZETag cloud tags, and another customer may have applied more than 1 million tags on the pallet), which is far more than what is currently available in Europe and the United States. See deployments of any size.
Other LPWA technologies mostly focus on building network capabilities but pay less attention to business aspects (i.e. use cases and ecosystems). For example, cellular IoT technologies LTE-M and NB-IoT were written into 3GPP Release 13 in 2016, and it took a while for the ecosystem to develop around them. In contrast, ZETA is built for specific use cases, and the initial step in deploying the technology is to establish an ecosystem of promoters and adopters through the ZETA Alliance - currently there are 118 members of the ZETA Japan Alliance, and the ZETA China Alliance has 142 members.
Zongxing Technology's low-cost, low-power smart tags are not an example of the overcrowded LPWA market. Instead, the technology brings real differentiation, alternative deployment models and disruptive capabilities to the asset tracking and smart labeling markets. China has always been a key market for Zongxing Technology due to its scale and growth in IoT opportunities, and its move into France comes as companies start to see the value of IoT and existing granular cargo tracking solutions still often come at a high cost time for further market expansion. In a fragmented European logistics market, the ability to track shipments at low cost and cover the entire journey can add significant value. Of course, Zongxing Technology needs to carefully handle different European market dynamics to launch different ZETag cloud tags or solutions.
Another lesson in the IoT space is that network operators and technology providers need to understand that customers care more about the results than the type of technology used. As China Tower has demonstrated, cellular technologies do not compete with proprietary LPWANs but collaborate with each other, meaning customers are able to more fully realize their individualized outcomes without the need for balancing trade-offs. It will be interesting to see how telcos adapt to this trend over the next few years, and how widespread legacy cellular operators operate proprietary LPWA networks.