“Simply put, we believe that the licensed LPWAN technologies will grow sharply in terms of their total revenue in the period, with Wi-SUN continuing its steady upwards trajectory as more utilities and smart cities adopt it. In the period, we do not anticipate LoRa or Sigfox having similar growth curves to LTE-M and NB-IoT, but expect that they may simply take longer to see such an aggressive growth – at some point spiking, and enjoying similar trajectories.”
It is important to reiterate that customers mostly do not care how data travels from the network edge into a cloud application – just that it does, and that it stays within their budget and failure tolerances. To many, the question of Sigfox vs. LoRa boils down to a few cells in an ROI spreadsheet calculation – but to others, mostly RF enthusiasts, the debate could last for weeks of heated email discussion (or hours or drinks in a networking event’s bar).
For the uncaring customers, LPWAN is just a means to an end – a way of transmitting data to a cloud-hosted business application that will crunch numbers and improve efficiency. As long as the LPWAN functions within the business plan, they aren’t going to notice.
Notably, we believe that there will be significant acceleration in Smart Agricultural deployments, as well as a growth in Consumer LPWAN deployments as a percentage of the total market – which would include smart home devices, with operators looking to take advantage of a service-based offering inside their customer footprint, as well as wearables connected to LTE-M networks for data connections.
We anticipate Smart Building deployments declining in terms of share, especially as more capable WiFi and Bluetooth technologies are deployed, and we believe Smart City deployments, and their unique infrastructure, will mean that integrators will opt for technologies like WiFi – relying on network footprint to accommodate the shorter range than LPWAN.
Chloe Spring (Marketing Manager): [email protected]
Office Phone: +44 (0)1179 257019