Orange said its low power wide area (LPWA) network based on LoRa technology now covers almost 4,000 towns and industrial sites in France, as it targets nationwide urban deployment for enterprises by the end of the year.

The company gave the update at the Viva Technology show in Paris, where it also announced plans to test LoRa roaming with other European operators by December.

In September 2016 Orange announced it had exceeded its LoRa deployment goal for the first half of the year, with 18 urban areas in France covering around 1,300 towns able to use the network. By the end of January 2017, the operator wanted to extend the LoRa network to 120 urban areas, approximately 2,600 towns.

Although already a significant way through its roll out of non-cellular LPWA technology, the company is also backing 3GPP-standardised IoT deployments.

At LPWA World in May its mobile IoT project leader Ronan Le Bras said demand for LPWA devices was wide ranging and some verticals would benefit from using cellular standards instead.

As revealed by Mobile World Live in November 2016, Orange is thought to prefer LTE-M to NB-IoT for its cellular IoT deployment, with LTE-M deployments in Belgium and Spain tipped for launch later this year (Light Reading also reported this week the operator is now mulling a mix of NB-IoT, as well as LTE-M, for its low-power operations in markets beyond France, potentially dealing a blow to any LoRa/Orange alliance outside France).

Both NB-IoT and LTE-M are gaining traction across Europe with operators in the process of testing and deploying their preferred technologies.

Earlier this week Mobile World Live reported Vodafone conducted limited testing of LTE-M in addition to the roll-out of NB-IoT in some of its European markets.