I’ve just spent some time in the hills between eastern Tuscany and north-western Umbria, and I kept running the same small experiment without meaning to. Walk into an ordinary osteria in a town nobody outside the province has heard of. Ask for the house wine. Ask where the oil on the table came from, and the cheese, and the meat in the ragù. The answer, almost every time, is a place you can see from the window.

In 2018, IBM and Maersk launched TradeLens: a blockchain platform meant to digitise global shipping, replacing the paper trail that follows a container from a Vietnamese factory to a Rotterdam warehouse with a single, shared, tamper-proof ledger. It had the backing of two of the largest logistics operators on earth. By 2023, it was dead.

I’ve spent a fair amount of ink on this site comparing LoRaWAN, LoRa mesh, and Wi-Fi HaLow: LPWAN and radio protocols shaped mostly by hobbyists, network operators, and the odd telco. There’s a fourth contender I’ve been putting off writing about, largely because it comes from a different world entirely. MIOTY didn’t grow out of a maker community or an open-source project. It grew out of Fraunhofer IIS research labs and the boardrooms of German industrial automation, and it arrived at the LPWAN table years after LoRaWAN had already set out the cutlery.