At last week’s LPWA 2017(see separate item), we were struck by the number of participants mentioning $5 NB-IoT modules as if they were already in the pipeline. From our conversations with chip module vendors and chipset makers, realizing this $5 price is still a work in progress and the timeline by no means assured. Manufacturers may be willing to accept some early losses, in order to kindle demand that should eventually lead to a volume-play victory, but the wider LPWAN (low power wide area network) market is very conscious of the Catch-22 nature of these IoT networks – where demand only arrives at a certain price-point but that demand is required to create the volumes that bring the price down.…