What is Lora and why is it important to your smart home?

Smart homes are constantly evolving, and endless waves of communication technology are emerging, committing to better connect devices and automate our lives.

Things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are obviously the best known and undoubtedly already packed into many technologies in your home. And there are smart home specialists protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave, or substance-enabled devices via threads.

One technology you may not have heard of is Lora (taken from “long distance”), a unique physical wireless communication technology.

Lora is a fairly major player in the commercial IoT space and is widely used in a variety of applications and devices, including smart meters, asset tracking, energy monitoring, and smart city planning.

But we see more consumers facing LORA devices. In other words, it’s a smart home device that normal people can buy and use in their own homes.

How does Lora work?

The clue is in the name. Lora’s long-range magic lies in its unique spread spectrum modulation technology, which is said to have a range of 100 times more than Bluetooth.

This technology allows for vast distances to travel through walls and other obstacles that normally interfere with wireless communication.

Imagine worrying about the strength of the signal, all devices that come out evenly from the basement to the attic and into the garden.

This extended range is an important advantage over other smart home technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

But Lora’s long reach isn’t its only superpower. It’s also incredibly power efficient.

Devices with LORAs can often run on batteries for years, greatly reducing the hassle of frequent replacements. This low power consumption is extremely important for devices like sensors. Sensors are often deployed in difficult-to-reach locations where battery replacements can cause pain in the buttocks.

What is Lorawan?

Lora is the underlying radio frequency technology that enables long-range low-power communications. It is the foundation on which the network is built.

The proprietary physical layer technology is owned by Camarillo-based Semtech, which acquired it in 2013 from the inventor’s French company Cycleo.

Meanwhile, the Lora Alliance is a nonprofit organization that oversees Lorawan. A communications protocol that defines how a device communicates using LORA radio.

Lorawan sets rules for how devices connect to the network, format and send data, and keeps things safe at the same time.

So Lora offers long distance communication capabilities, while Lorawan adds the structure and organization needed to create a functional network.

The Lora Alliance includes quite a few names, including Amazon, Cisco, Comcast, Microsoft, Semtech, Stmicroelectronics, and Thing Things Industries.

Why is this all important to smart homes?

The impact on smart homes is pretty obvious. We all want devices that want better communication in larger areas without needing hubs or repeaters everywhere, right?

Things like Yosmart, Shelly and Eddy already have products for sale – all packing LORA Tech, including leaky detectors, smart water valves, garage door openers, light switches, and more. And the Connected Things Store has lots of Lora gateways and devices for you to try out.

Yes, you’ll need a separate hub/gateway to use these, but just as Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Wi-Fi and more live together in one box, brands could potentially add Lora Radios to their multiskilled smart home hubs.

One such brand, TrackNet, went back to CES 2018 and actually showed off such a box.

The Tab, a smart home monitoring platform, never took off, but the gateway doubled as a functional dual-band 801.11AC Wi-Fi router, showing what it is possible.

How can you use Lora in your smart home?

But Lora isn’t a magic bullet and its use cases will be quite niche… so why is it carving out the market in the commercial IoT space, not in the smart home of consumers at this time?

LORA’s data rates are relatively low, making it unsuitable for applications that require large amounts of data, such as video streaming, music casting, and more.

However, its long distance, low power consumption, and cost-effectiveness make it an attractive option for connecting a wide range of devices, especially on the safety/security monitoring side.

Things like Zigbee and Z-Wave have dominated this space for decades. Furthermore, given the recent developments of Z-Wave Long Range, if LORA is able to carve out market share, alliance members may also try to free it from the shackle of business-focused positioning.

One area where Lora appears to have gained some position is the robotic lawn mower market. The excellent Mammotion Luba 2 AWD used LORA to keep the robots and base stations paired in large gardens, while CES 2025 was flooded with brands introducing machines with similar setups.

Lora FAQ