The platform is built on a protocol created by Echelon Corporation for networking devices over media such as twisted pair, power lines, fiber optics, and wireless.
Echelon's power line and twisted pair signaling technology were also submitted to ANSI for standardization and acceptance.
Since then, ANSI/CEA-709.1 has been accepted as the basis for IEEE 1473-L (in-train controls), AAR electro-pneumatic braking systems for freight trains, IFSF (European petrol station control), SEMI (semiconductor equipment manufacturing), and in 2005 as EN 14908 (European building automation standard).
The two-wire layer operates at 78 kbit/s using differential Manchester encoding, while the power line achieves either 5.4 or 3.6 kbit/s, depending on frequency.
An Echelon Corporation-designed IC consisting of several 8-bit processors, the Neuron chip was initially the only way to implement a LonTalk protocol node and is used in the large majority of LonWorks platform-based hardware.