Comcast’s machineQ is expanding to 12 new cities

Comcast announced today its long-range (LoRa) service for the internet-of-things space, machineQ, will be rolling out to a dozen new cities across the U.S.

In the first part of 2018 Comcast aims to offer 50 percent coverage in 12 sprawling metropolitan areas like Baltimore, Boston, Miami, and Washington, D.C.

Other cities include: Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Oakland, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

The service first dropped late last year in a trial run in Philadelphia and San Francisco, later expanding to Chicago. Using the now-standard LoRaWAN protocol, machineQ can link up physical sensors that gather data which, in turn, can be put to use by applications or sent to the almighty cloud.

According to Alex Khorram, general manager of machineQ at the Center City comms giant, the platform has allowed new IoT use cases to come to fruition, especially those that were not “commercially viable” due to issues like the cost of connectivity and end devices, limited battery life, and inability to get coverage.

In partnership with Comcast, Technical.ly hosted a hackathon that yielded 15 ideas for leveraging the machineQ network in pollution monitoring, traffic reduction, pothole detection and more.