Echelon Corporation

» see echelon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Echelon's own prospectus says it "was founded and began operations in February 1988." The founder was A.C. "Mike" Markkula Jr., who had already been Apple's third employee and its second chief executive, and who put up money for a company whose entire premise was that ordinary objects should be able to talk to each other over whatever wire happened to be nearby. Ken Oshman, who had built ROLM into the telephone-systems company IBM bought in the 1980s, arrived as chief executive in December 1988 and was still running Echelon a decade later when it went public.

The idea arrived about twenty years before the vocabulary did. A light switch and an electricity meter both need to report what they are doing and take instructions, and in 1988 that meant proprietary wiring from whichever manufacturer you had chosen. Echelon's answer was a network that cost almost nothing per node and belonged to nobody in particular, running over power lines or over twisted pair. The first Neuron chips shipped in December 1991, years before anyone coined the phrase "internet of things" for what they were doing.

Adesto Technologies announced on 29 June 2018 that it would buy the company, at $8.50 a share in cash, valuing the equity at roughly $45 million and the enterprise at roughly $30 million. The merger closed on 14 September. Thirteen days later Echelon's chief financial officer filed the Form 15 that ends a public company's life, and in the box asking for the approximate number of holders of record he wrote one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the neuron ~

The product that made the argument real was a chip. The Neuron, manufactured under license by both Motorola and Toshiba, was a small controller with the entire networking protocol already burned into it and a unique 48-bit identifier set at the factory. A manufacturer building a thermostat did not implement a network stack; it soldered on a Neuron and the thermostat was on the network. Every chip therefore left the factory with a permanent address of its own, in 1991.

My own working life has been spent on the far side of this problem, which is why the distance here is professional rather than geographic. The field devices I deal with now assume a network the way they assume electricity, and that assumption is roughly what Echelon spent thirty years constructing and selling at a few dollars a node. Nobody in that line of work says the word Echelon. They say LON, which is the three letters left over from a name that has been gone since 2018.

~ the meters of italy ~

The biggest thing Echelon ever did is the one almost nobody in the English-speaking internet has heard of. Enel, the Italian electricity utility, decided to replace every meter in the country with a networked one, and the preliminary agreement was announced on 10 May 2000 under the headline "Enel and Echelon Sign Preliminary Agreement to Network 27 Million Italian Homes." Echelon's own annual report for 2006 confirms the scale: Enel replaced its stand-alone meters with networked ones at about 27 million customer locations, with Echelon shipping from late 2000 and completing its scheduled deliveries in 2005.

Italy therefore had a national smart-metering system running on Echelon's power-line networking years before the rest of Europe started arguing about whether to build one. It was also a trap. Revenue was $109.9 million in 2004, the last year in the published series in which Echelon made money, and then $74.4 million in 2005 and $57.3 million in 2006 as the Enel work wound down. Enel revenue alone fell by $37.2 million in 2005, to $26.9 million, and by 2006 Enel and its meter makers were 12.4 percent of the company. No second national utility ever placed an order like it.

~ the standard it won ~

Echelon did the thing everyone says a platform company should do: it gave the protocol away to the standards bodies, which published it as ANSI/CEA-709.1 and later as ISO/IEC 14908, and it became a layer underneath BACnet as well. Winning the standard did not win the market. BACnet, backed by the American heating and air-conditioning engineers' association, became what building-controls people specified by default, and the LonWorks share of new installations declined steadily through the 2010s.

The numbers after that are a long slide with one last climb in it. Revenue peaked at $156.5 million in 2011 on the back of a smart-meter business of Echelon's own, collapsed to $38.7 million by 2014 when the grid business was sold, and finished at $31.7 million in 2017. The company recorded a net loss in every year from 2005 to 2017. Headcount went from 325 people in February 2009 to 74 in the final annual report.

~ where the engineers went ~

The parts were sold on and on. Adesto went to Dialog Semiconductor in 2020, Dialog to Renesas on 31 August 2021, and in October 2022 EnOcean bought the edge-computing business that had been Echelon's systems and software line. All of that catalog is still for sale under EnOcean's name, the commissioning tools and the SmartServer included, and a search for "echelon" on EnOcean's site returns nothing at all. echelon.com now redirects to an EnOcean product page.

The chips are going too. Renesas has marked the FT6050 as not recommended for new designs, and in June 2025 the chairman of LonMark International wrote that Renesas had announced the discontinuation of the remaining Neuron family, advising everyone who depends on it to plan a last-time purchase. About 27 million Italian meters went in with that networking inside them, each one answering to a 48-bit number burned in at a Motorola fab, on behalf of a company that has not existed since 2018.

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