DECT NR+ Reaches the Factory Floor: STRATUM 9 Ships Production-Ready Industrial Gateway

Austrian startup STRATUM 9 has launched a gateway that brings DECT NR+ into industrial production environments. The hardware targets applications where cables hit their mechanical or economic limits – and where Wi-Fi simply isn’t reliable enough.

With the DECT NR+ Gateway, the Kufstein-based company addresses a well-known problem in industrial automation: moving systems are expensive to connect via cable, and conventional wireless standards like Wi-Fi use contention-based access, meaning devices compete for transmission capacity. The result is unpredictable latency – a serious issue in safety-critical applications.

WeSpeakIoT has previously covered DECT NR+ in depth: the wireless standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) works with fixed transmission time slots, eliminating collisions and making communication timing fully predictable. It is the first and, so far, only non-cellular 5G technology.

What the gateway actually does

The device operates in the dedicated 1.9 GHz band and supports both time-critical control applications and sensor-based use cases such as smart metering. For mobile systems, the seamless handover function – uninterrupted switching between radio cells during active communication – is the defining feature.

For system integrators, the most practical aspect may be the transparent protocol handling. The gateway transmits PROFINET and PROFISAFE without modifying or wrapping the protocols, meaning no changes to existing automation architectures are required. A competing product exists in this space: RFmondial, a German broadcasting technology firm, offers a DECT NR+ IP gateway, but positions it as a development and integration reference based on an evaluation board and Raspberry Pi host. STRATUM 9’s offering is aimed at direct deployment in live production environments.

First users in intralogistics

The initial real-world example comes from materials handling. Components manufacturer DETO Automation and ROFA Group, a specialist in electric overhead conveyor systems, are already using the gateway in intralogistics projects. “The demand for retrofits in existing facilities is high, as is the requirement to implement them during ongoing operations without downtime,” says Martin Wolf, Managing Director of DETO Automation Germany. “This is exactly what we can now offer our customers through the transparent PROFINET transmission developed by STRATUM 9.” STRATUM 9 was founded in Kufstein, Austria in 2022 by Alfred della Torre jr. and Hubert Feurstein. The majority shareholder is DETO Beteiligungs GmbH, an investment group which also includes DETO Automation.

The gateway is available now and can be ordered directly from STRATUM 9. The company also offers a licensable software stack, a starter kit for evaluation and prototyping, and a development package for custom end-to-end solutions.