mioty FAQ
Welcome to our resource for all questions regarding mioty® and the mioty alliance.
mioty is a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology standardised by ETSI as TS 103 357, based on the Telegram Splitting Ultra Narrowband (TS-UNB) protocol. It sends small sensor messages over several kilometres in licence-free sub-GHz spectrum by dividing each message into short radio bursts spread across time and frequency. This makes transmissions robust against interference and collisions, which is what allows very large numbers of battery-powered devices to share one network.
mioty was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen, Germany, where research on the underlying telegram splitting method began in 2009. The technology was subsequently standardised at ETSI and handed to an industry alliance for governance and certification. The name mioty is derived from “my iot” but the “m” also stands for “massive IoT” – referring to the excellent scalability of the mioty technology.
An LPWAN (low-power wide-area network) is a class of radio technology for devices that send small amounts of data over long distances while running on a battery for years. The trade-off is deliberate: very low power and long range in exchange for low data rates and higher latency. mioty, LoRaWAN, Sigfox and NB-IoT are all LPWANs. They differ mainly in how they handle interference, who operates the network, and where the cost sits.
The technology originated at Fraunhofer IIS and is standardised at ETSI as TS 103 357. The mioty alliance, a non-profit industry association, governs the specification, maintains the technical documentation, operates product certification and manages the mioty brand. All patents needed for using the mioty technology are externally handled by Sisvel according to the FRAND framework (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory).
mioty is specified in a publicly available ETSI standard, TS 103 357, which anyone can obtain and implement, and it is not tied to one manufacturer’s proprietary physical layer. Several RF chipsets from different semiconductor companies support mioty already today, deferring the risk of a vendor lock-in. Open specification and royalty-free are separate questions, however. The underlying patents are licensed centrally through the Sisvel platform, so implementers should treat licensing as a distinct step from obtaining the specification.
The mioty alliance is a non-profit industry association that standardises, certifies and promotes mioty. It was founded in November 2019 and publicly launched at Embedded World in Nuremberg in February 2020. Its members span the IoT value chain — semiconductor manufacturers, module and device makers, base station and software vendors, and system integrators. The alliance manages the mioty brand, maintains the specifications and operates the certification programme that verifies interoperability between vendors.
mioty is used where many battery-powered sensors must report reliably over long periods in difficult radio conditions. The established fields are utility metering for water, gas and heat; industrial monitoring for quality and predictive maintenance use-cases; smart building and smart city infrastructure; smart agriculture for open-field and remote sensing; asset tracking across sites, ports and airports; and safety-critical applications including lone-worker protection. The common thread is device density and battery life rather than any particular industry.
mioty suits organisations that operate large numbers of sensors in one area and want to own the network and its data: utilities, industrial operators, municipalities, facility managers and metering service providers. Critical infrastructure for public safety and other mission critical applications, like industrial solutions, are also well suited as mioty is extremely robust and reliable. It also suits device manufacturers who want a standardised, licence-free radio without depending on a single chipset supplier. It is less relevant to a few dozen devices scattered across a country, where a cellular subscription is usually simpler.
mioty runs in licence-free spectrum on infrastructure you or a partner operate, with no SIM and no per-device subscription, whereas cellular IoT such as NB-IoT runs in licensed spectrum on a mobile operator’s network with a recurring fee per device. The practical consequence is where the cost sits: infrastructure and operations for mioty, subscriptions for cellular. It also differs as regards battery life time and predictability of battery usage; with mioty you have lower energy consumption and a predictable usage scheme allowing you to correctly calculate the battery life time.
mioty is in commercial deployment. The protocol has been an ETSI standard since 2018, with a revised specification published in June 2024, and certified products from multiple manufacturers are available across endpoints, modules, base stations and software. The alliance operates a certification programme that verifies correct implementation of the mioty specifications. It is a younger ecosystem than LoRaWAN, so the device catalogue is smaller, but the technology itself is not experimental.
The largest share of mioty devices currently deployed in the field is used for automated meter reading in utilities, particularly for water, heat and gas metering. This use case was among the first to roll out at scale and typically involves thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices across a city or utility network. Other sectors are now following with strong growth rates: critical communications deployments include dedicated mioty networks covering entire regions, such as South Tyrol in Italy, while industrial monitoring and quality applications are being deployed across factories. Smart building management is also emerging as a major application area, with deployments of several hundred mioty devices per building already taking place. You can find a selection of the most recent deployments on the mioty Alliance case studies section
Yes. mioty’s range, around 15 km in open, flat terrain, and its battery life, up to 14 years on a primary battery, suit sparse outdoor sensor networks as well as dense ones. The architecture that scales to massive device counts in a city doesn’t require high density to be worthwhile: a single base station can economically cover a large rural area with relatively few devices, for example soil moisture, greenhouse monitoring, irrigation or livestock sensors reporting a few times a day.
The mioty Alliance does not collect deployment statistics from its members, both for practical and compliance reasons. As an open ecosystem, we therefore cannot provide an official count of deployed devices.
What we can say with confidence is that mioty® is experiencing strong market momentum. Across our ecosystem, members consistently report annual deployment growth rates of 100% or more, driven by the increasing demand for highly reliable and scalable LPWAN solutions.
These examples reflect a clear trend: organizations are increasingly selecting mioty® for large-scale, long-term IoT deployments where reliability, scalability, and open standards are key requirements.
As additional smart metering, industrial IoT, and critical infrastructure projects move into production, the mioty ecosystem continues to grow rapidly worldwide.
mioty® is used by utilities, industrial companies, municipalities, system integrators and technology providers worldwide.
The technology is supported by a growing ecosystem of approximately 80 member organizations within the mioty Alliance, including semiconductor manufacturers, module vendors, gateway suppliers, software providers, research institutes and system integrators working together to deliver interoperable solutions.
Smart metering is currently the largest deployment area for mioty®, where utilities benefit from its exceptional scalability and reliability.
At the same time, adoption is rapidly expanding into additional industries, including:
- Industrial IoT
- Critical Infrastructure
- Building Automation
- Environmental Monitoring
- Smart Cities
- Agriculture
- Logistics and Asset Tracking
As reliable sensor data becomes increasingly important for automation and AI-driven applications, more industries are adopting mioty® for mission-critical communication.
mioty® was developed to provide a wireless communication technology that remains reliable even when millions of devices share the same radio spectrum.
Its vision extends beyond radio communication: to enable secure, resilient and interoperable digital infrastructures built on open standards. Developed in Europe, mioty® supports digital sovereignty by offering an open alternative to proprietary IoT ecosystems while ensuring long-term interoperability and legal certainty.
As IoT deployments continue to grow, wireless networks must support far more devices while maintaining reliable communication. Conventional LPWAN technologies often reach their limits in dense deployments, where interference and collisions lead to increasing packet loss.
mioty® addresses these challenges by combining exceptional scalability, reliability and spectral efficiency. It enables trusted data transmission for applications where communication must remain dependable, even under difficult radio conditions.
The mioty Alliance is the international industry association behind mioty®. It develops, maintains and promotes the technology while fostering an open, interoperable ecosystem across the entire IoT value chain.
Today, around 80 companies, research institutes and industry organizations are members of the Alliance. Together they develop hardware, software, cloud platforms, testing tools and complete IoT solutions that ensure long-term interoperability and continuous innovation.
mioty® is an open, standardized LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology designed for reliable, scalable and energy-efficient IoT communication. Developed in Europe and standardized by ETSI, mioty® enables millions of battery-powered devices to communicate securely and reliably, even in dense or interference-heavy radio environments.
Its core innovation, Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA), makes mioty® significantly more robust and scalable than conventional LPWAN technologies, making it well suited for applications such as smart metering, industrial IoT, critical infrastructure and environmental monitoring.
Telegram Splitting Multiple Access is the channel access method behind mioty. Instead of transmitting a message as one continuous signal, TSMA divides it into many short sub-packets, called bursts, and distributes them across different frequencies and points in time according to a defined pattern. Because interference rarely hits every burst, and forward error correction can rebuild the message from a subset, individual collisions damage the transmission rather than destroying it.
A telegram is encoded with forward error correction and cut into short bursts. Each burst is transmitted on its own frequency at its own moment, following a pseudo-random frequency hopping pattern known by the receiver. The base station collects the bursts, reassembles them and reconstructs the original telegram. Because the bursts are separated in both time and frequency, an interferer that occupies one frequency or one moment does not affect the successful transmission of the message.
A burst is one of the short radio sub-packets a mioty telegram is split into. Each burst carries a fragment of the encoded message and lasts on the order of 15 milliseconds. A complete telegram consists of at least 24 such bursts sent across different frequencies and times. The burst, rather than the whole message, is the unit that can be lost without the transmission failing.
Forward error correction adds redundancy so the receiver can reconstruct a telegram from an incomplete set of bursts. In mioty, only 50 % reception of the bursts is sufficient to recover the full message, which means half the transmission can be destroyed by interference or collision without any data loss and without a retransmission. This is what turns telegram splitting from a spreading technique into a robustness mechanism.
Robustness comes from combining three properties: each burst is very short, so it presents a small target in time; the bursts are spread across the band, so a narrowband interferer reaches only some of them; and forward error correction tolerates the loss of a substantial share. Interference that would destroy a single continuous transmission removes only part of a mioty telegram, and the remainder is enough to make the transmission succeed.
A mioty system has four elements. End Points (EP) are the sensing devices in the field that transmit data and are usually battery-powered. Base stations (BS) receive the bursts and reassemble telegrams. The Service Center (SC) manages the network, encryption keys, and forwards the data. The Application Center (AC) is where the End Points are managed and the data forwarding to the correct IoT Platform or Business Intelligence software is handled, sometimes also the decoding of the raw message bytes. mioty works in a star network topology: End Points can only talk to Base Stations, not between each other.
An End Point (EP) is a mioty device that transmits sensor data — a meter, a sensor module or a gateway to another bus system. It contains a sub-GHz radio transceiver and the mioty protocol stack in software. Because the stack is implemented in software rather than in dedicated silicon, End Points can be built on standard transceivers from several manufacturers rather than on one supplier’s chip.
A Base Station receives the bursts arriving from all End Points in range, identifies which bursts belong to which telegram, reassembles them and applies error correction to recover the message. It then forwards the recovered telegrams to the Service Center over a backhaul connection. One Base Station serves a large number of End Points simultaneously, and End Points do not need to be assigned to a particular base station in advance.
The Service Center is the network management layer of a mioty system. It manages encryption keys, receives raw data from the Base Stations, deduplicates telegrams received by more than one Base Station, and forwards the data to the Application Center. It is the component that turns a set of base stations into a coherent network, and it can be operated by the network owner or by a service provider.
The Application Center is the End Point and application management layer of a mioty system, and therefore the point of contact between a mioty system and any higher level applications like databases, business intelligence and customer specific IoT Platforms. It receives decoded telegrams from the Service Center and applies the payload semantics specific to the device. Most Application Centers use the dedicated blueprint format for a standardized decoding of the raw payloads.
A mioty blueprint is a standardized JSON description of a device’s payload that defines how the raw bytes transmitted over the air are structured and interpreted, including fields, data types, sizes, units, conversions and, where needed, calibration or derived values. The blueprint itself is not transmitted over the air; it is provisioned out of band and used by a blueprint-capable application center or IoT platform to decode the compact payload into structured data. This keeps mioty telegrams small and energy-efficient while providing a standardized way to integrate devices without writing a custom decoder for each device.
Yes. mioty supports bidirectional communication between the End Point and the base station. Like other LPWAN technologies, mioty uses a star architecture and is optimized for massive numbers of battery-powered End Points transmitting uplink messages to a common Base Station. A downlink channel is available for occasional communication from the base station to the End Point, for example to change a configuration, acknowledge a message, or trigger an action in the field. The downlink is therefore not intended for continuous communication and has substantially less capacity than the uplink.
mioty operates in licence-free sub-GHz frequency bands, with the applicable frequencies and radio parameters depending on regional regulations. While the mioty technology itself can theoretically be implemented on other frequency bands where required, the mioty Alliance has defined regional radio profiles specifying the frequencies and operating parameters that can be used in different parts of the world. For most of Europe, mioty operates in the 868 MHz band using two 100 kHz channels. In the United States, mioty can operate in the 915 MHz band in accordance with the applicable frequency-hopping rules. Other regions follow their respective regulatory requirements and may use different frequency bands, including 433 MHz. The current list of regional profiles is available in the mioty Alliance document hub.
The mioty protocol is implemented in software on top of a standard sub-GHz radio transceiver, rather than requiring a dedicated proprietary chip. In practice this means a device manufacturer can choose among transceivers from several silicon vendors, existing hardware designs can sometimes gain mioty support through a firmware change, and the protocol can, in some cases, even be updated without changing hardware.
The mioty Alliance has tested and validated mioty on a range of sub-GHz radio chipsets from several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics and Semtech. This multi-vendor support is a structural difference from LPWAN technologies built around one company’s proprietary physical layer: a mioty product isn’t tied to a single chipset maker’s roadmap, pricing or supply. Support varies by mioty class and by chipset. For uplink, the radio just needs to support FSK transmission; for downlink and fully bidirectional operation, the chipset additionally needs to provide access to I/Q data reception. The mioty stack can also be ported to other radio chipsets if required.
mioty End Points transmit without prior coordination with a base station: they send their bursts according to the defined pattern whenever they want, and the base station identifies and reassembles them on reception. There is no scheduling handshake in the cellular sense before an uplink can be sent, which keeps device complexity and energy use low and is part of why the technology scales to very large device counts. One exception is the use of classes B and C, where the End Points listen to synchronization beacons emitted by the Base Stations.
In theory, mioty can achieve ranges of up to 800 km under exceptional conditions with direct line of sight, making it interesting for applications on high-altitude balloons and satellites as well. For example, the SMARTIES project by Max Planck Institute and Fraunhofer IIS uses mioty-enabled sensors on balloons to measure atmospheric conditions and track their position. On the ground, practical factors such as obstacles, multipath propagation, fading, antenna height and local interference significantly reduce the achievable range. For network planning, around 15 km in open, flat terrain and 2-3 km in urban environments, including reliable penetration into buildings and basements, are more realistic planning figures.
A single mioty base station serves in the order of 100,000 End Points, and a network built from multiple base stations scales well beyond one million devices. The limit is not a device count but a message load: what constrains a network is the total number of telegrams per unit of time and spectrum, so capacity should always be calculated from the reporting profile of the actual devices.
mioty Base Stations are certified to handle at least 3.5 million of 10-byte telegrams per day in the 200 kHz spectrum in the uplink. Further parameters like message size and transmit intervals will therefore have an impact on the maximum amount of devices possible in a network and need to be considered for capacity planning.
A mioty End Point consumes approximately 17.8 µWh to transmit a 10-byte message at 868 MHz. Rather than being transmitted in a single continuous burst, the message is split across at least 24 short sub-telegrams, distributing the transmission energy over time and reducing the instantaneous power demand on the battery.
There are mioty devices on the market with battery lifetimes of up to 14 years using small primary batteries, essentially approaching the shelf life of the battery itself. Unlike other LPWAN technologies, mioty Class Z devices do not require MAC-layer network negotiation based on the device’s location, making battery consumption, and therefore battery lifetime, much more predictable. Actual battery lifetime depends primarily on the reporting interval, payload size, and battery capacity.
A mioty application payload ranges from 10 to 245 bytes. How often a payload of a given size may be sent is governed by the regional duty cycle limit rather than by the protocol, so payload size and reporting interval are planned together. A typical 10-byte package with mioty can be transmitted up to 99 times per hour, while still staying in the 1% duty cycle. For comparison, Sigfox caps uplink payloads at 12 bytes.
LPWAN technologies are generally not designed around high data rates. Instead, the more relevant parameters are the payload size and transmission interval. mioty End Points typically transmit small amounts of sensor data, such as temperature and humidity, or a water meter reading including water temperature and other metadata a few times per day.
mioty supports payloads of up to 245 bytes per message, allowing multiple sensor values and application data to be transmitted in a single telegram. The achievable effective data throughput depends on the selected mioty profile, radio configuration and transmission conditions, but for typical LPWAN applications, the transmission interval and payload size are more meaningful measures than a continuous data rate.
Because a telegram is spread across multiple short bursts over a period of several seconds, mioty typically has latency in the range of seconds rather than milliseconds. Some mioty configurations, such as Low Latency or High Data Rate, can reduce this latency, but it is an inherent consequence of the transmission mechanism that provides mioty’s exceptional robustness and cannot simply be tuned away. Applications requiring deterministic, real-time control should therefore not use mioty, or LPWAN technologies in general.
mioty supports devices moving at up to 120 km/h, which covers road and rail applications such as asset tracking in transit and vehicle-mounted sensors. Telegram splitting helps here: because the bursts are spread over time and frequency, changing channel conditions during a transmission affect only part of the message rather than all of it.
mioty is well suited to deep-indoor environments, which is why it is used for meter reading in basements and underground installations. The key factor is the link budget: sub-GHz frequencies provide inherently good range, while mioty adds excellent receiver sensitivity, with gateways typically achieving around -136 dBm in practice and up to -147 dBm theoretically. This provides substantial margin for penetrating walls and other obstacles, even as reflections and attenuation affect signal strength. Actual building attenuation depends heavily on construction, so a site survey remains the most reliable way to assess coverage for a specific building.
mioty is designed to operate at packet error rates below 1%, corresponding to packet success rates above 99%. This is an exceptionally high level of reliability for an LPWAN and is enabled by mioty’s Telegram Splitting approach: each message is distributed across multiple sub-telegrams in time and frequency, allowing the receiver to reconstruct the complete message even when individual sub-telegrams are lost or interfered with.
Independent measurements support this level of robustness. In a field study conducted by SAF Tehnika and Riga Technical University, mioty sensors showed approximately 100 times lower packet loss than a comparable radio system under the same conditions.
A mioty network degrades gradually rather than abruptly. As the channel becomes busier, more bursts collide, and messages that lose more than the correctable share are lost — but the effect appears as a rising error rate across the network rather than as a sudden failure. Capacity is extended by adding base stations, by reducing reporting frequency, or by using additional channels.
mioty and LoRaWAN offer comparable receiver sensitivity. The theoretical limit, determined only by thermal noise, is around -147 dBm for mioty in EU1 mode, compared with -148 dBm and -151 dBm for the most robust LoRaWAN modes, SF11 and SF12, respectively. With real-world hardware, mioty typically achieves a sensitivity of around -136 dBm, almost exactly between the LoRaWAN datasheet values of -136.5 dBm for SF11 and -139.5 dBm for SF12. An independent comparison study commissioned by the mioty Alliance confirms this: in terms of raw receiver sensitivity, mioty performs comparably to the most robust LoRaWAN modes.
Yes, for tracking and status reporting rather than real-time control. mioty supports devices moving at up to 120 km/h, and telegram splitting means changing channel conditions during a transmission, for example passing under a bridge or through a tunnel, affect only part of a message rather than all of it. Combined with multi-year battery life and long range, this suits asset tracking and condition monitoring on vehicles or rail cars that can’t be recharged or have their battery replaced on a fixed schedule. If the application needs low-latency control rather than periodic position or status reporting, that’s outside what mioty, or LPWAN technologies in general, are designed for.
mioty combines three properties that matter for this specifically: battery life of up to 14 years on small primary batteries, with consumption that is predictable because Class Z devices need no location-based MAC negotiation; payloads from 10 to 245 bytes, with reporting rate governed by the regional duty cycle limit rather than the protocol; and range of around 15 km in open terrain, or 2 to 3 km in urban and deep-indoor conditions. In practice this means a sensor can be installed once, report for a decade or more without a site visit, and still sit at the edge of a facility rather than needing to be within short range of a gateway.
mioty and LoRaWAN are both licence-free sub-GHz LPWAN technologies, but they handle interference differently. LoRaWAN uses chirp spread spectrum and transmits each message as one continuous signal, so a collision can destroy the whole message. mioty splits every message into short bursts across time and frequency, and forward error correction reconstructs it from roughly half of them. mioty is therefore stronger in dense, interference-heavy environments; LoRaWAN has a substantially larger device ecosystem and widespread public network coverage.
NB-IoT is a 3GPP cellular standard operating in licensed spectrum, while mioty operates licence-free in sub-GHz ISM bands. NB-IoT needs a SIM, a mobile network operator and a per-device subscription, but delivers coverage without building infrastructure. mioty requires own or partner base stations and has no recurring airtime cost. NB-IoT suits assets scattered across a country; mioty suits dense sites and campuses where the operator wants to own the network and its data.
Sigfox and mioty both use ultra-narrowband transmission but differ in message model and operating model. Sigfox limits uplinks to 12-byte payloads and around 140 messages per device per day and is delivered as an operated service. mioty supports larger payloads, is not bound to a single operator and can run as a private network. Sigfox’s advantages are very low device cost and a single global service contract, which removes network planning from the customer’s scope entirely.
Wi-SUN and mioty target different network topologies. Wi-SUN builds an IPv6 mesh with data rates in the tens to hundreds of kbit/s, typically between mains-powered nodes such as street lights and grid equipment. mioty uses a star topology optimised for battery-powered sensors sending small messages over many years. Wi-SUN fits where throughput, IP addressing and mesh resilience matter; mioty fits where devices must run on a battery for a decade.
Wireless M-Bus (EN 13757) is a metering-specific protocol designed primarily for walk-by and drive-by readout at short range, while mioty is a general LPWAN designed for fixed-network collection over long distances. In smart metering the two are frequently combined, which lets a utility move to daily or hourly readout without replacing the meter fleet. Both sit under the same umbrella standard, the Open Metering System (OMS, based on EN 13757). OMS has used wM-Bus as its transmission layer for years and is the established data language for water, gas and heat submetering, so a meter that speaks OMS can be read by the same head-end systems and utility platforms regardless of which radio technology actually carries the bits.
OMS 4 defines wM-Bus as the transmission layer, covering the LMN (Local Metrological Network) interface used today for walk-by/drive-by reading and for the local connection to a Smart-Meter-Gateway. OMS 5 adds mioty as a second transmission layer, published as OMS-TR08 “OMS over mioty” and OMS-S Annex Q “OMS LPWAN”. Running on mioty’s ETSI TS 103 357-2 Telegram-Splitting physical layer, this LPWAN Splitting Mode turns the same OMS application layer and data model into a fixed-network technology: instead of someone walking or driving past the meter, a stationary mioty base station collects the readings automatically over long range, deep indoor included. Because the application layer and data model don’t change, a head-end system that already decodes OMS 4 data can process OMS 5 / mioty4OMS data the same way, without a separate integration path, as if it were still OMS 4.
Yes, and it’s already running in commercial rollouts today. A meter can carry both communication paths at once: a local wM-Bus/OMS 4 channel for walk-by readout, and an LPWAN mioty4OMS channel for automated fixed-network collection by the utility. Both can run simultaneously, so whichever side picks up a transmission, wM-Bus or mioty, gets forwarded and processed. This gives full backward compatibility: field staff can still do a manual wM-Bus walk-by read on demand whenever needed, while mioty handles the regular automated collection in the background.
mioty is the stronger choice when a deployment combines high device density, a noisy radio environment and a battery life requirement measured in years. Typical cases are metering rollouts with tens of thousands of endpoints in one collection area, industrial sites with heavy electromagnetic interference, and devices moving at road speeds. If you know that your LPWAN network will be operational for 10 years or more, and you have plans for substantial growth of devices in your network, mioty provides a much more scalable solution providing much higher Quality of Service (QoS) and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Typically you will need 3-6 times less gateways with mioty and as the TCO is almost directly proportional to the number of gateways, the cost will be substantially lower with mioty. A mioty network will also put a much lower strain on the radio environment as the telegram splitting technology uses much less space on the radio bands, allowing other solutions to work long term, even when the number of LPWAN devices in the network is growing substantially. If the priority is instead a broad catalogue of off-the-shelf devices, an existing public network, or the lowest entry cost for a small pilot, LoRaWAN is usually more practical.
mioty is not suitable for applications needing low latency, high throughput or large data transfers. Because a message is spread across many bursts over several seconds, mioty is inappropriate for real-time control loops, and its data rate rules out transferring images, audio or full firmware images over the air. Deployments depending on an existing nationwide public network, or requiring the widest possible selection of certified off-the-shelf devices, are also better served by LoRaWAN or NB-IoT today.
Yes, this is what the industry now calls a hybrid network: hardware vendors including Miromico and RAKwireless already build gateways that receive both mioty and LoRaWAN natively, so a single site installation can serve both networks side by side. On the device side the protocols stay separate: an End Point transmits one or the other. In practice, hybrid networks let an operator run both protocols in parallel on one shared platform and pick whichever fits a given use case: lower-traffic applications such as smart parking or air-quality monitoring commonly run on LoRaWAN, while high-density or deep-indoor use cases such as water metering run on mioty, both managed from the same network server, which also makes a gradual device-by-device migration between the two straightforward.
In a real-world side-by-side deployment at Riga Technical University (464 identical sensors with mioty stack and 464 with a LoRa-based protocol installed floor-matched in the same 8-floor building), SAF Tehnika measured a mean packet loss of 0.056% for mioty against 7.2-16.5% for the LoRa devices, depending on sub-band. The dominant loss mechanism identified for mioty was signal attenuation through the building, not collisions.
A mioty End Point consumes approximately 17.8 µWh per message at 868 MHz, supporting battery lifetimes measured in years to well over a decade depending on reporting interval. Cross-technology energy comparisons are the least reliable figures in this field, because vendor numbers assume different payloads, transmit powers and reporting intervals. For a real decision, calculate the energy budget for your own message profile rather than comparing headline figures.
The three differ mainly in where the cost sits. NB-IoT removes infrastructure investment and replaces it with recurring per-device subscriptions. mioty and private LoRaWAN invest in base stations and operations and then carry no airtime cost, which favours dense deployments. For mioty, patent licensing through the Sisvel platform is an additional item to include. Break-even is driven mainly by device count per site and expected operating years. On the device side, NB-IoT devices are usually more expensive due to a more expensive radio module and need for a bigger battery. LoRaWAN and mioty devices usually cost the same (see examples of device makers that do both mioty and LoRaWAN versions of the same product)
The LoRaWAN ecosystem is significantly larger than the mioty ecosystem, in member organisations, available off-the-shelf devices and existing public network coverage. The mioty alliance has approximately 80 member organisations covering chipsets, modules, End Points, base stations, software and integration — enough for complete solutions, but a smaller catalogue. Buyers needing a specific device type should check the mioty portfolio early rather than assuming an equivalent exists.
Migration is possible but is not a purely over-the-air change. End Points must run a mioty stack, requiring either a firmware update on a transceiver that supports it or a hardware replacement. On the infrastructure side, some base stations support both technologies, so gateway sites can often be reused. The usual approach is a parallel rollout: existing devices continue on LoRaWAN until end of life while new device groups are commissioned on mioty.
mioty is specified in the open ETSI standard TS 103 357 and implemented in software, so it runs on standard sub-GHz transceivers from several silicon vendors rather than on one supplier’s proprietary physical layer. Certification by the mioty alliance verifies interoperability between products from different manufacturers. Patent licensing is handled centrally through the Sisvel platform and according to FRAND principles, so licence terms are documented and offered on the same basis to all implementers rather than negotiated individually.
mioty was designed for exactly this scale. A single base station handles at least 3.5 million 10-byte telegrams a day and serves in the order of 100,000 end points, and a network built from multiple base stations scales well beyond one million devices. As a rule of thumb, a city of around 500,000 inhabitants typically runs on 30 to 40 antenna sites. Telegram splitting uses the limited available radio spectrum smarter than other technologies and is therefore a future-proof choice for dense urban environments.
mioty is a strong fit here. Splitting each message into short bursts across time and frequency means a narrowband interferer, such as a variable-frequency drive or welding equipment, typically damages only some of them, and forward error correction restores the rest (see 2.5 and 4.11 for the mechanism). This isn’t only theoretical: in a field study by SAF Tehnika and Riga Technical University, mioty sensors measured roughly 100 times lower packet loss than a comparable radio system under the same real-world conditions (see 3.11).
mioty is the most direct answer within the licence-free LPWAN category. A single base station serves in the order of 100,000 end points and at least 3.5 million telegrams a day. LoRaWAN transmits each message as one continuous signal, so a collision can destroy it outright, which limits how many devices can be supported by one gateway. Outside the licence-free category, NB-IoT and Wi-SUN scale differently, through licensed-spectrum cellular infrastructure or a mesh topology respectively, rather than being directly comparable on this specific question.
Three criteria matter most for a deployment at that scale. Battery life and predictability: mioty Class Z devices need no location-based network negotiation, which keeps consumption predictable and supports lifetimes up to 14 years (see 3.5). Robustness under interference and device density: telegram splitting tolerates the loss of over half a message’s bursts, and field data shows roughly 100 times lower packet loss than a comparable system under real interference (see 2.5, 3.11, 4.11). Scalability headroom: capacity is governed by message load rather than a hard device ceiling, with base station counts and network capacity able to grow well beyond initial rollout size (see 3.2, 3.3, 5.2). mioty is the strongest match when all three matter together over a multi-year deployment; see 4.8 for when that combination specifically favours mioty over LoRaWAN.
Yes. mioty is specified in the publicly available ETSI standard TS 103 357, so any organisation can obtain the specification and implement it without depending on one manufacturer’s proprietary physical layer (see 1.5). The standard defines the radio protocol itself; the mioty alliance’s certification programme separately verifies that products from different manufacturers interoperate correctly (see 7.3, 7.10). For the density side of the question, telegram splitting is what makes mioty specifically suited to a factory’s dense, interference-heavy radio environment, see 4.11 and 4.18 for the mechanism and field evidence.
If your project requires reliable communication, long battery life and the ability to scale from hundreds to millions of devices, mioty® is an excellent choice.
It is particularly suitable for projects where network reliability directly affects business operations, such as:
- Smart Metering
- Industrial IoT
- Critical Infrastructure
- Building Automation
- Environmental Monitoring
- Smart Cities
- Asset Monitoring
Beyond its technical advantages, mioty® also provides long-term investment protection through its open standard, transparent licensing model and growing ecosystem.
The defining characteristic of mioty® is its unique Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA) communication method.
Instead of transmitting a complete message at once, mioty® divides each telegram into many small sub-packets that are transmitted across different frequencies and points in time. This allows gateways to reconstruct messages even when many individual sub-packets experience interference.
The result is a technology that offers:
- significantly higher network scalability
- exceptional reliability
- efficient use of shared radio spectrum
- lower infrastructure costs
- an open, ETSI-standardized ecosystem
Planning a mioty network starts from the message profile rather than from coverage: how many devices, how often each reports, and what payload. From that follows the required capacity, and from the site geography and building construction follows the number and placement of base stations. A radio survey validates the plan for the specific location. Because the topology is a star, planning concerns base station placement rather than mesh routing. Several mioty Alliance members can support with professional network planning services if needed.
The number of base stations follows from three factors: the area and terrain to be covered, the construction of the buildings the devices sit in, and the total message load. In open terrain a single base station can cover a wide area, while in dense urban environments or deep indoor installations, more base stations are needed for the same footprint. As a rule of thumb, a larger city with around 500,000 inhabitants typically runs on 30 to 40 base stations.
The practice shows that network planning tools are simulating the circumstances quite appropriately. A site survey is recommended for validating the simulation and also for any deployment where devices sit in difficult radio positions: Basements, metal enclosures, underground chambers, because building construction affects the link far more than distance does. The purpose of a survey is to confirm the link budget at the worst positions, not the average ones.
A mioty base station forwards recovered telegrams to the Service Center over TCP/IP using the mioty BSSCI specification. Ethernet, cellular or another available internet connection may be used for the transmission. Because the payloads are small and the message rate is bounded by the radio, backhaul bandwidth requirements are modest compared with the device count served.
mioty can be run entirely as a private network. Because it operates in licence-free spectrum, an organisation can install its own base stations and operate its own Service Center without a spectrum licence or an operator contract, keeping both the infrastructure and the data under its own control. Operated and hosted models are also available from members of the alliance for organisations that prefer not to run the network themselves.
Yes. The mioty Service Center can be operated on the customer’s own infrastructure as well as in the cloud, which is often decisive for utilities and industrial operators subject to data residency or critical-infrastructure requirements. Several member companies offer Service Center software in both hosted and on-premises form.
The Application Center usually does not contain any long-term storage and forwards decoded telegrams to an upper layer over a standardized MQTT interface, so integration follows the same pattern as any other data source. Platforms with existing mioty support include Pallax and Kilo IoT with a native Application Center integration and LORIOT at the Service Center level, while others such as Akenza offer a higher-level IoT platform with a seamless mioty integration. Where a platform has no native support, integration is a matter of connecting to the mioty Application Center’s northbound interface.
Each mioty End Point carries a unique identifier from the manufacturer’s IEEE EUI-64 address-range and is registered in the Application Center together with its encryption keys before it can be used. Once registered, the device transmits and any base station in range forwards its telegrams; there is no manual assignment of devices to particular Base Stations. Bulk provisioning from manufacturer-supplied device lists is the normal path for large rollouts.
Yes, the mioty specification has foreseen firmware updates over the air over the downlink interface. The practical implementation is down to the device manufacturer, and firmware updates usually take a long time to transmit over mioty downlink messages. Even though the firmware packages can be broadcasted to many End Points at the same time, it is still a very battery-consuming operation, and most manufacturers provide other interfaces like BLE or NFC for their firmware update strategies.
Network monitoring happens at the Service Center, which sees every telegram, the base stations that received it and the received signal strength. The operationally meaningful indicators are the message success rate per device, the received signal margin at the weakest positions, and the trend in both over time. A device whose margin is falling is the early warning that matters, well before messages start being lost.
mioty shares the licence-free sub-GHz bands with many other systems, and telegram splitting is what makes that coexistence workable: short bursts spread across the band are both less likely to be hit by another transmission and less likely to block one. mioty observes the same regulatory constraints as any other device in these bands, including duty cycle limits in Europe.
In Europe, devices in the 868 MHz band are subject to duty cycle limits under ETSI EN 300 220, typically 1 % in the relevant sub-bands, which caps how much of each hour a device may transmit. Because mioty messages are short, the limit constrains reporting frequency rather than message size in most applications. In the United States, FCC Part 15 frequency-hopping rules apply instead, which makes mioty a Frequency Hopping technology with maximum dwell time regulations rather than duty cycle limitations. Regional profiles in the specification address these differences.
Yes, and the mioty architectural philosophy already foresees a solid architecture to prepare for commercial network operations and massive rollout scenarios. In mioty, we see the Base Stations including the Service Center as a layer of infrastructure. This infrastructure has to be built and maintained, and with the SCACI interface, it can be clearly separated from the Application Center, which cares about the End Points and upper layer integrations instead. For roaming between networks, the operators connect their Service Centers and End Points use over-the-air attachment to be able to register on the roaming network.
mioty security works on two layers. The network layer is mandatory: every message between an end point and a base station is encrypted with AES-128 in counter mode and signed with a CMAC, using a network key that is registered and managed by the Service Center. On top of that, an application layer is optional: a second, independent AES-128 encryption using a separate application key that the network itself never holds, so payloads can stay unreadable to the network operator and only be decrypted in the customer’s Application Center. Both mechanisms are specified in the alliance’s dedicated security guideline and, for the application layer, in the Application Layer Specification, so certified products from different manufacturers apply the same protections.
The mandatory network layer uses AES-128 in counter mode (CTR), with a mandatory CMAC signature for message authenticity. On top of that, an optional application layer offers seven modes: no application cryptography, confidentiality only, confidentiality with perfect forward secrecy, authenticity (confidentiality plus a 4-byte CMAC signature), authenticity with perfect forward secrecy, and two agnosticity modes that add a fully separate application-layer packet counter for 7 bytes of overhead. Which mode an end point uses is a device property, declared in its application layer format description, not negotiated per message.
The network key is registered and held by the Service Center, which hands it to base stations as devices attach. If application-layer encryption is used, the separate application key goes only to the Application Center, never to the network operator, and the guideline recommends running the two provisioning processes independently so there is no correlation between them. For getting a key onto the device in the first place, the security guideline documents three approaches used in practice: printed keys, where the manufacturer prints the key as a barcode or QR code on the device and it is scanned in during commissioning, a central key server, where the manufacturer uploads the key indexed by device ID and the operator retrieves it on demand, and local key generation, where the device or a manufacturer-provided tool generates the key itself on premises so no third party, including the manufacturer, ever holds it. Each has a real trade off between usability and how many parties ever see the key, and which of the three a specific product supports depends on that manufacturer, not on the mioty standard itself.
Yes. The optional application-layer encryption described above is genuinely end-to-end: it uses an application key the network components never hold, so the security guideline states explicitly that the data is never available unencrypted on its way through the mioty network when this is used. For devices with over-the-air attachment, a fresh application session key is derived for every session, and perfect forward secrecy can additionally be applied so that even a future key compromise cannot expose previously recorded traffic. This matters most where the network is operated as a service by a third party, which is a common arrangement in metering.
Both the network layer and, if used, the application layer build their encryption around a packet counter that must never repeat for a given key. The receiving side is required to keep track of received packet counters and reject duplicates, and the Application Layer Specification names this explicitly as the protection against replay attacks in the uplink direction. For downlink, tying encrypted application data to one specific packet counter also mitigates known-plaintext attacks if a message were ever resent.
Telegram splitting raises the effort required to jam a mioty transmission: because bursts are short and spread across the band, a narrowband jammer only reaches a fraction of them, and the forward error correction absorbs that loss. A broadband jammer with enough power can still disrupt any radio system operating in licence-free spectrum, mioty included. The realistic claim is increased resilience against interference and narrowband jamming, not immunity, and this sits under what the security guideline calls Quality of Connection, a distinct property from confidentiality or authenticity.
Each end point has a network key registered at the Service Center, and messages are authenticated with a CMAC computed from that key, so telegrams from an unregistered device are not accepted. One nuance worth stating precisely, since the security guideline flags it itself: this is a symmetric key scheme, so any party holding the key, including a base station the device has attached to, could in principle also produce a message that authenticates as genuine. That is authenticity, not the stronger guarantee of non-repudiation you would get from a certificate-based system. Bidirectional devices reduce the exposure by deriving a fresh session key on every attachment, so a compromised session key does not expose the device’s entire lifetime of traffic.
During regular operation, an observer sees a 16-bit short address that is deliberately not unique to one device, it is only a hint the network uses to narrow down which key to try, not a reliable identifier from outside. The one exception is the attachment request itself, which is sent unencrypted and does contain the device’s full, globally unique identifier, though only once per attachment, not continuously. Payload content stays encrypted at the network layer always, and additionally at the application layer if that is enabled. As with any radio system, an observer can tell that a transmission happened and roughly when.
The alliance maintains a dedicated security guideline as one of its technical specification documents, available through the alliance’s documentation area.
Whether a mioty deployment processes personal data depends on the application, not the radio: consumption readings tied to a household are personal data, machine condition data in a factory generally is not. For the case where it does, the security guideline has an actual documented answer rather than just general IoT advice: for multi-tenant deployments it proposes a distinct Trust Center role that is the only place in the network holding personal information about customers and their devices, explicitly stated as being done to protect customer privacy and ensure compliance with GDPR. The Service Center only ever sends the Trust Center message counts per device, not personal data, and the Trust Center matches device IDs to customers internally for billing. Application-level end-to-end encryption complements this by keeping the application key, and the data it protects, on the customer’s own premises. This pattern does not make a deployment compliant by itself, the usual controls around lawful basis, retention and access still apply, but it is the alliance’s own structural recommendation rather than something to reconstruct from general principles.
The Cyber Resilience Act places obligations on manufacturers of products with digital elements, and NIS2 places obligations on operators of essential services, so both apply to the devices and the operators in a mioty deployment rather than to the radio standard itself. The alliance’s position is that CRA compliance is the responsibility of the manufacturer and the operator, while the alliance keeps its specifications written in a way that supports compliance.
mioty is defined by ETSI TS 103 357, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute specification covering short-range device protocols, in which mioty corresponds to the Telegram Splitting Ultra Narrowband (TS-UNB) protocol. The standard was first published in 2018, with TS 103 357-2 V2.1.1 published in June 2024. Being an ETSI specification, it is publicly obtainable and implementable by anyone.
TS-UNB stands for Telegram Splitting Ultra Narrowband, the protocol family within ETSI TS 103 357 that mioty implements. “Ultra narrowband” refers to the very narrow carriers each burst is transmitted on, and “telegram splitting” to the division of a message into those bursts. In practice, TS-UNB is the standard’s name for the technology and mioty is the certified, branded implementation of it.
The ETSI specification defines the radio protocol — how telegrams are encoded, split, transmitted and recovered — which is what makes independent implementations interoperable at the air interface. It does not define a complete commercial system: network management, security practice, application payload semantics and product quality are addressed by the alliance’s own specification documents and by its certification programme. Standard compliance and mioty certification are therefore related but distinct.
Certification verifies that a product behaves correctly against the mioty specification and interoperates with equipment from other manufacturers, which is what allows a buyer to combine devices, base stations and software from different vendors. It also permits use of the mioty mark. For a device manufacturer the practical value is commercial: certified products can be listed in the alliance’s portfolio and specified by buyers who require interoperability.
Certification has two stages. First, a framework agreement is signed with the mioty alliance, which grants access to the certification portal and the test tools. Second, the product is submitted with its technical documentation and test results for assessment. On successful completion the product receives a certificate and the right to use the mioty certification logo. The process is open to any company, with preferential conditions for members.
A product must implement the mioty specification correctly and pass the defined conformance tests, submitted together with technical documentation of the implementation. The mioty certification is a self-declaration and each manufacturer decides if they want to perform the tests in their own labs or send the product to a specialized test house.
Certification fees depend on membership status: certification is free of charge at the highest membership level, €3,000 at the intermediate level, and €6,000 for non-members and entry-level members. The fee covers assessment of one product submission.
The mioty certification is a self-declarative process and takes as long as the manufacturer needs to run all the tests. The current certification specification is available for download on the mioty Alliance website, and we recommend to use it already during the product development process, as it tests the most challenging parts of developing with the mioty protocol. After having submitted the test report, it will take a couple of weeks at maximum for the mioty Alliance to review and approve your certification tests.
Certification is open to any company, not only to members of the mioty alliance. Members receive preferential conditions, but membership is not a precondition for certifying a product. The submitting party signs the framework agreement with the alliance and is then able to use the certification portal and test tools.
Certification verifies conformance to the mioty specification and is the mechanism by which the alliance establishes interoperability between products from different manufacturers, which is its principal purpose. It applies to the mioty interface: certified devices work with certified base stations and Service Centers. It does not cover application-layer data semantics, where payload formats remain device-specific unless a common profile is used.
Certified mioty products are listed in the alliance’s product portfolio, covering End Points, modules, base stations, development kits, software and services from member manufacturers. Each entry identifies the manufacturer, the product category and its certification status, so a buyer can confirm before purchase that a specific product is certified rather than merely mioty-capable. Note: as mioty is defined by an open standard, there is no requirement for a company to be part of the mioty Alliance. This means that there may be certified products that do not show up on the mioty Alliance website.
Yes. mioty is an open ETSI standard rather than one vendor’s proprietary system (see 1.5), several independent chipset vendors support it (see 2.15), and alliance certification specifically verifies interoperability between certified products from different manufacturers (see 7.10). This covers the mioty radio interface itself: certified end points work with certified base stations and Service Centers regardless of manufacturer. It does not cover application-layer payload semantics, where a shared blueprint format or profile is still needed so different devices’ data is interpreted consistently by the same platform.
mioty is an openly published ETSI standard, but implementing it involves patented technology, and those patents are licensed through the Sisvel licensing platform. Implementers should therefore treat obtaining the specification and obtaining a patent licence as two separate steps.
The patent owners are Apator Miitors ApS, Diehl Metering Systems GmbH, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. and Koninklijke KPN N.V. The foundational patents derive from research at Fraunhofer IIS, with a German application filed in 2013 and a United States application in 2014. Licensing is administered by Sisvel International SA.
Sisvel operates the licensing platform for mioty, announced in April 2020, which administers patent licences centrally on behalf of the contributing patent holders. The practical effect for an implementer is a single point of contact and a common set of terms, rather than separate negotiations with individual patent owners. Sisvel handles licensing only; standardization and certification remain with ETSI and the mioty alliance respectively.
The MIOTY Portfolio Licence Agreement does not currently cover components or sub-assemblies, such as, without limitation, chipsets, semiconductor components, embedded modules or firmware components. The royalty rates are offered on a per product basis, respectively applicable only for end devices making use of the TS-UNB Specification
Sisvel‘s MIOTY Licensing Platform is a joint licensing platform offering licences to patents necessary to practise the TS-UNB Specification and separately to patents which are deemed complementary to MIOTY implementations.
Please note that OMS devices implementing Splitting Mode according to the Open Metering Specification Vol. 2 and especially Annex Q, may require a license under the TS-UNB Patents.
The joint licences address market needs for efficient licensing, making relevant patents more easily accessible and ensuring that all users of the MIOTY technology benefit from the transparency and the convenience of the licence terms available under the programme.
The MIOTY Licensing Platform is offered under a running royalty licence scheme. In addition, relevant products may be licensed under a committed volume scheme. For more details visit the License Terms page on Sisvel.com.
To foster the development and implementation of MIOTY technology, Sisvel also offers interested parties a special trial agreement to evaluate the technology and its market.
The Standard rates are EUR 0.32 for an Unidirectional End Point, EUR 0.80 for a Bidirectional End Point and EUR 8.00 for a Gateway. With committed volumes, the rates are discounted, see details on Sisvel.com
No, a membership in the mioty Alliance does not include any patent licenses. It does include the right to use the mioty brand.
Sisvel apply Fair and non-discriminatory practices (FRAND) that reflect the technological value of the patents they manage
Patent licences for mioty are obtained through the Sisvel licensing platform, which administers the programme and is the point of contact for implementers. The alliance itself handles membership and certification, so a company bringing a product to market typically deals with both: Sisvel for the patent licence, the alliance for certification and use of the mark.
mioty is a registered trademark, originally registered by Fraunhofer IIS in 2015 and by the mioty alliance in 2024. Use of the mioty name and the certification mark in product marketing is tied to certification and to the terms set by the alliance. Only members of the mioty Alliance may use the mioty brand in their marketing.
mioty is a commercial technology designed for massive IoT deployments, so it does not have a large Open Source community. However, there are active contributors from academia and the maker community, and the mioty Alliance maintains a list of relevant Open Source projects on its developer page.
Open Source is a particularly good way for developers to get started with mioty and explore the technology. Several projects are available under non-commercial licenses, including an Open Source mioty Stack for the Raspberry Pi Pico and Arduino.
A membership will help your company shorten the time to market, do more business and increase visibility for your mioty products and solutions. It gives your company direct access to mioty Alliance ecosystem, to the technical experts, preferential certification conditions, presence in the alliance’s product portfolio and member directory, a route to influence the technology’s development and more. For manufacturers and integrators the practical value is early access and visibility to buyers who specify certified mioty products.
The alliance offers a tiered membership structure ranging from a top level for organisations driving the technology (Leader level), through intermediate levels (Adopter level) for manufacturers and service providers who develop, certify and promote mioty products, to entry-level and free institutional membership for research organisations and startups.
Annual membership fees are €30,000 at the highest level, €20,000 for small and medium-sized enterprises at that level, €5,500 and €3,500 at the intermediate levels, and free of charge for institutional members and under the startup scholarship.
Yes. The alliance offers a reduced rate for small and medium-sized enterprises at the top membership level, and a startup scholarship providing free membership. The tiering is based on company size in annual revenue: above or below 50 million Euro.
Yes. Institutional membership is offered free of charge to universities and research organisations, giving access to the mioty ecosystem and to the alliance’s technical work. This is the route for academic groups working on LPWAN research, and it is also how independent evaluation of the technology becomes possible.
Benefits scale with your membership level. A Leader, or Full, membership gives your company the possibility to initiate and drive both the advancement of the mioty technology and the Marketing and Business Development to align with Your goals. An Adopter, or Associate, membership allows you to participate and get access, not initiate and drive. A membership cover access to the member platform that contains pre released specifications, certification conditions, business development and marketing material and activities. You also get access to expert support, portfolio and directory presence, and participation in the alliance’s technical bodies. At the manufacturer level this includes expert consultation sessions, with discounted rates for additional sessions.
Joining begins with contacting the alliance’s office to select a membership level and receive the membership agreement. You can also go directly to the on-line application form: Member Application Once the agreement is signed and the annual fee settled, the organisation gains access to the specifications, the member area and the certification conditions attached to its level, and is listed in the member directory.
The Governance of the mioty Alliance is defined in the mioty Alliance Articles of Association.
The mioty alliance is governed by three bodies: the General Meeting, the Executive Board, and the Advisory Board. The General Assembly Meeting, held annually and open for all members, is the supreme decisionmaking body. This is where the Executive Board is elected and strategic guidelines are set. The Executive Board manages operations, proposes budgets, implements resolutions, and oversees committees. The Advisory Board—composed mainly of incubators—approves budgets, key legal transactions, and advises on committees and governance. Incubators hold veto rights over Board appointments. Committees and working groups support both boards on technical, marketing, business development and strategic topics.
The mioty Alliance’s work is split into two main Committees under the Executive Committee: the Technical Committee and the Business Development & Marketing Committee. Each committee runs taskforces to drive the evolution of the mioty technology and the mioty brand forward. The main goals for the Business Development & Marketing Committee are to grow the eco system, increase the awareness, increase the members values, expand in new markets
The mioty alliance has approximately 80 member organisations spanning the IoT value chain, from semiconductor manufacturers and module makers through device and base station vendors to software providers , system integrators and end customers (users). Founding members included Fraunhofer IIS, Texas Instruments, Diehl Metering, Diehl Connectivity Solutions, ifm, Ragsol, STACKFORCE and WIKA.
The alliance publishes its member organisations on its website.
All members can participate in the alliance’s technical work, which is mainly done in Taskforces. Taskforces are initiated and lead by Full (Leader) members and Associate (Adopter) level members are invited. The specification is developed within the alliance rather than imposed on it, so members contribute to how the technology evolves.
Yes. mioty is standardized at ETSI and the specification is publicly obtainable, so implementation does not require membership, and certification is open to non-members as well. Membership provides preferential conditions, technical support and influence rather than permission. Patent licensing is a separate matter administered through the Sisvel platform and applies regardless of membership status. You may not use the mioty brand in your marketing if you are not a mioty Alliance member.
Evaluation usually starts with a development kit and a single base station, testing the link in the actual environment the devices will operate in — particularly the worst positions, such as basements or metal enclosures. In parallel, the message profile should be defined: device count, reporting interval and payload, since those determine capacity and battery life. A small pilot in the real location tells you more than any datasheet range figure.
The most useful setup for getting started with mioty is a mioty Base Station and a few End Points. Many manufacturers also offer development or demo kits that simplify the initial setup. These kits typically include pre-configured End Points and a backend connection, so you can start receiving data without having to register and configure every component yourself.
For an especially simple development setup, you can use a mioty Base Station with the Service Center and Application Center running directly on the Base Station hardware. This allows you to connect to the system via MQTT and consume decoded mioty payloads directly in JSON format.
Keep in mind, however, that this is not representative of how most commercial mioty deployments are architected. In production systems, the mioty Service Center and Application Center will typically run remotely on a server or in the cloud, while the Base Station acts primarily as the radio interface.
Development gateways such as the AVA1 may also have different RF performance and sensitivity characteristics from commercial-grade mioty Base Stations. They are therefore useful for development and experimentation, but should not be used for benchmarking mioty radio performance.
mioty hardware is supplied by member companies rather than by the alliance itself. The alliance’s product portfolio lists certified End Points, modules, base stations, development kits, software and services with their manufacturers, and purchasing runs directly with those companies. The portfolio is the starting point for identifying which manufacturer offers a product matching a given requirement.
The mioty Alliance operates a dedicated developer portal at developers.mioty-alliance.com, providing resources such as technical documentation, tutorials, webinars, and other materials to help developers get started with mioty.
mioty Alliance members also have access to a separate members’ portal with additional technical documents, implementation guidance, internal news, and opportunities for peer discussion and collaboration.
There are several ways to get a mioty stack, depending on the desired balance between development speed and control. Commercial stacks are available from Stackforce, while Fraunhofer IIS offers a stack that can be adapted to your own requirements. An Open Source stack is also available for academic and non-commercial use, making it useful for learning and experimentation.
The available options depend on the radio chipset. The mioty Alliance maintains an up-to-date list of supported chipsets, stacks, and capabilities on its developer portal. Pre-certified mioty modules are another option for those who want to minimize integration and certification effort.
Start by deciding whether you need bidirectional communication. Uplink-only Class Z devices are generally the simplest, most energy-efficient option and offer the widest choice of hardware.
You can integrate mioty into a single-chip design, use a separate MCU and radio, or use a mioty modem or module. Modules provide the fastest path to a working product, while direct integration offers greater flexibility and optimization potential.
mioty requires accurate timing, so the design should use a crystal oscillator with less than 20 ppm drift, ideally 10 ppm or better. The selected chipset and stack must also support the required mioty features.
For a certified product, the End Point must comply with the mioty certification and licensing requirements. Using a pre-certified module can significantly reduce both development and certification effort.
In some cases, yes. mioty does not use LoRa’s chirp spread spectrum modulation; it uses GMSK on standard sub-GHz FSK radios. Some Semtech LoRa chipsets also support this FSK mode and can therefore run mioty.
For example, the SX1276 is supported by commercial mioty stacks, while the SX1261/SX1262 are supported by Stackforce and the Open Source stack for uplink-only Class Z operation. Check the current chipset support list before selecting hardware, as supported features and stacks evolve.
This means reusing compatible radio silicon, not running mioty and LoRaWAN simultaneously. The existing hardware design must also meet mioty requirements, particularly for oscillator accuracy and timing.
A useful mioty pilot should test the hardest conditions, not the average ones. Deploy a small number of devices at the most challenging locations and run them for several weeks. This provides a more representative picture of message success rates than short-term walk testing and captures changes in the RF environment over time.
Scope the pilot around a concrete decision, such as the required number and placement of Base Stations, rather than simply the number of devices.
Test in realistic RF conditions, especially dense urban environments with interference and heavily occupied ISM bands. A controlled lab comparison is unlikely to show mioty’s key advantage: its robustness in challenging radio environments.
The alliance’s member directory identifies companies by their role in the value chain, including system integrators and solution providers alongside hardware and software vendors. For a project spanning devices, network and platform, an integrator that has delivered comparable deployments is usually the shortest route, and the directory is the starting point for identifying candidates.
Technical support is available from three sources: the mioty Alliance member portal for peer discussion and exchange, the supplier of the relevant hardware or stack for product-specific questions, and the mioty Alliance for specification and certification matters. The mioty Alliance also provides solution design support and assistance with pilot projects to help get mioty deployments started. Alliance members additionally have access to consultation with the Alliance’s technical experts as part of their membership.
The alliance runs webinars covering the technology, its applications and deployment practice, and publishes them for later viewing. Members additionally receive expert consultation sessions as part of their membership. Events and webinars are announced on the alliance’s website.
Developer documentation covers the technical overview, sensor and base station developer information, the BSSCI interface specification, backend architecture, the physical layer, MAC and higher layers, the security guide, and device classes and features. Alongside the documents there are step-by-step tutorials, a payload and airtime calculator, and a set of open-source reference implementations on GitHub.
mioty defines four device classes, each balancing downlink capability, latency, and energy consumption. Class Z supports uplink only, providing the lowest energy consumption. Class A adds downlink during a defined receive slot following an uplink, making it suitable for configuration and other infrequent commands. Class B adds scheduled receive windows for downlink communication with latencies of typically less than one minute, suitable for applications such as actuators using broadcast or multicast. Class C provides the lowest downlink latency, with up to four-second latency, at a higher energy cost. Even so, its energy consumption can remain lower than that of technologies requiring the receiver to stay continuously active.
Choose the lowest class that meets the requirement, because downlink capability costs energy. Class Z suits pure telemetry where a device never needs to be addressed. Class A is the default for devices that must be reconfigured occasionally. Class B suits actuators and control applications tolerating up to a minute of latency. Class C is for genuine low-latency control and should be assumed to require a power supply rather than a battery.
mioty is structured in five layers. The physical layer implements telegram splitting between End Point and base station. The MAC layer handles channel access, address resolution, message integrity and authenticity, and network-level decryption. The LLC layer carries network management such as attachment, detachment and link adaptation. The network layer transports user data to the Application Center, and the application layer handles data presentation and application-specific services.
BSSCI is the base station to Service Center interface specification, published by the mioty Alliance. It defines the standardized way how a base station communicates with a Service Center, which is what allows base stations and Service Center software from different vendors to be combined. An open-source implementation is available under the Apache licence.
Several evaluation boards are available. The ST NUCLEO-WL33CC1, based on the STM32WL3, runs a mioty evaluation stack supporting Class Z and bidirectional Class A. Radiocrafts offers development boards for its RC1882CEF-MIOTY1 module. The mioty M3B Makerboard integrates temperature, humidity, barometric, acceleration and ambient light sensors. For open hardware, a demo board design combines a Raspberry Pi Pico with a HopeRF module.
Yes. For development and testing, you can build a mioty Base Station using a Linux computer or Raspberry Pi together with an SDR receiver. The Open Source miotyGO project from Loriot supports SDRPlay RSP1A/RSP1B receivers and can receive uplinks from up to 10 mioty End Points. It is uplink-only and intended for non-commercial use. For production deployments, a dedicated mioty Base Station implementation with suitable RF hardware and performance is required. The mioty Alliance can provide guidance on suitable implementations and development support.
The mioty Alliance maintains a list of commercially available mioty Base Stations. There are currently more than 10 different products from several manufacturers, including WEPTECH, MIROMICO, SWISSPHONE, RAK, WITTRA, and Diehl Metering. The portfolio ranges from compact development and indoor gateways to industrial and outdoor Base Stations, as well as modules and plug-in solutions for integrating mioty into existing gateway hardware. The current list and product details are available on the mioty Alliance website.
Several Service and Application Center solutions are available for mioty. Commercial options include LORIOT, PALLAX by abl solutions, Kilo IoT, and WEPTECH. Fraunhofer IIS also offers a Service and Application Center implementation for licensing. The available solutions differ in features, deployment models, and integration options. For development and evaluation, some implementations are also available in configurations suitable for non-commercial use.
A growing number of IoT platforms support mioty, with particularly strong coverage among mioty Alliance members. These include AKENZA, PALLAX by abl solutions, and Kilo IoT, as well as industry-specific platforms such as Diehl Metering and ifm moneo. WEPTECH/LUPUS also provides mioty-enabled application solutions.
The mioty Alliance maintains an up-to-date overview of available application management and platform solutions, covering use cases from smart metering and industrial IoT to building and asset management.
The Application Center can expose mioty data through a standardized MQTT interface. If the Application Center supports Blueprints and your End Point’s Blueprint has been uploaded, you can receive decoded, semantic values in JSON format. Otherwise, the payload is available as the raw hexadecimal data transmitted by the End Point. The MQTT interface can also be used to manage End Points, Blueprints, and End Point Groups.
A mioty application payload ranges from 10 to 245 bytes. How often a device may send a payload of a given size depends on the regional duty cycle limit rather than on the protocol, so payload size and reporting interval have to be planned together. The alliance publishes a payload and airtime calculator for exactly this purpose.
Airtime is the accumulated duration of the radio bursts themselves, and it is what regulatory duty cycle limits measure. Total transmission time is the whole span from the first burst to the last, including the silent gaps between them. Because telegram splitting spreads bursts over time, the two differ substantially in mioty, and confusing them leads to incorrect duty cycle and latency calculations.
Low Latency mode uses a different TSMA time pattern (pattern group 3 instead of the default groups 1 and 2), which shortens the core frame transmission window from under 3.7 s to under 0.766 s. Burst count, burst duration and symbol rate are unchanged, so this only affects timing, not throughput or range, and the duty-cycle budget consumed per message should be unaffected.
mioty currently has seven defined regional radio profiles, spanning 433 MHz to 927 MHz: EU868A and EU868 around 868 MHz for Europe, EU433 around 434 MHz also for Europe and a wider set of countries beyond it, US915W around 915 to 916 MHz for the US, Canada and parts of Central America and the Caribbean, IN866 around 866 MHz for India, CN510 around 486 to 494 MHz for China, and DC927W around 926 to 927 MHz for the Dutch Caribbean, the only one of the seven that uses licensed rather than license-exempt spectrum. Which profile applies depends on the deployment country.
Payload format is defined per device by the manufacturer, not by the mioty protocol itself, using an Application Layer Blueprint (ALB), a JSON document specifying how to interpret that device’s binary payload. The Application Layer Specification defines the structure this blueprint must follow.
Yes. The developer portal publishes a guide to selecting demo kits, an end-to-end demonstration walking through a complete system, and a blueprint tutorial. Supporting documents cover setting up and operating a mioty system, a ThingsBoard and Grafana Docker setup, building an IoT dashboard, using the Raspberry Pi Pico, antenna setup, and the end-to-end solution as a whole.
You can perform a field walk with any mioty End Point and analyze RSSI, SNR, and packet loss on the backend. Dedicated field-testing devices, such as those from emSys, can display signal measurements directly on the device. This is particularly useful for installers who need to quickly determine the best location for an End Point.
The alliance offers direct developer support through its IoT solutions engineers, including bookable consultation calls, alongside the community area and the documentation. Manufacturers of specific hardware and stacks provide product-level support, and Fraunhofer IIS offers development support for teams building their own End Points or base stations.
Especially proprietary medium range and wide area IoT connectivity solutions, such as meshed networks and traditional LPWAN technologies, transmitting data wirelessly in license free bands are affected of this trend. These technologies were developed for point-to-point connectivity, but not for large-scale deployments. That approach makes them not only vulnerable to interference. They are characterized by a variety of issues impeding transformational change.
Limitations of today’s available LPWAN
The mioty technology
mioty is a software based low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) protocol that was developed to overcome today’s and future wireless connectivity limitations. With its best-in-class reliability and scalability mioty is designed for massive industrial and commercial IoT deployments.
The core invention behind the mioty technology is the Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA) method. As defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI TS 103 357), Telegram Splitting splits the data packets to be transported in the data stream into small sub-packets at the sensor level.
These sub-packets are then transmitted over different frequencies and time. An algorithm in the base station permanently scans the spectrum for MIOTY sub-packets and reassembles them into a complete message. Due to sophisticated Forward Error Correction (FEC), the receiver only needs 50% of the radio bursts in order to completely reconstruct the information. This reduces the impact of corrupted or lost bursts due to collisions and increases the resistance to interference.
