It would have been unthinkable in the early years of low power WAN deployments, up to a decade ago, but now pressure is growing on the two once fiercely competitive early runners, LoRa and Sigfox, to unite and converge towards a common ecosystem.
The call has come from, among others, Henri Bong, co-founder and CEO at Taiwan-based Sigfox operator and IoT development house UnaBiz. While Bong perhaps overplays the intensity of the rivalry today, he has caught the mood well when he talks of their overlapping and yet complementary capabilities, which he thinks could be forged into a compelling and winning technology set.
Bong merely hints at the real elephants in the room, the two cellular contenders – NB-IoT and LTE-M. Of these two, LTE-M came along first as a stripped-down version of LTE with the benefit of sharing the same spectrum and base stations, but simplified to reduce processing overhead and so improve battery life. But it was still relatively inefficient and quite costly, partly because it relied on some patents requiring payment of royalties on the underlying technologies.
LTE-M has gained some traction, especially the USA, having been available just as a software upgrade to existing LTE base stations. But it is being usurped on the cellular side by NB-IoT for applications requiring less computational power and more intermittent communications at low bit-rate, such as smart metering. NB-IoT then was developed mostly for cheaper and simpler chips consuming less power and exploiting unoccupied or orphan spectrum, rather than sharing with other applications.
This pits NB-IoT more squarely against Sigfox and LoRa for those major markets in metering and monitoring, but the competitive picture varies enormously by geography and sector. This makes the LPWAN field confusing from a market share standpoint and requiring a regional and vertical perspective to analyze accurately.
Lack of perspective has led to some very contradictory surveys and forecasts, with some still ranking LoRa and Sigfox as totally dominant, while others have LoRa and NB-IoT as the joint leaders.
France-based Sigfox has been most successful in Europe, while making relatively little headway in North America and not that much more elsewhere. LoRa has also performed strongly in Europe, but then gained significant share across Asia-Pacific, with even some major wins in China. LoRa’s developer, Californian semiconductor firm Semtech, broached China in 2017 with development of a 23 kilometer span test network across Beilin District Central University City in the ancient capital of Xi’an. This was part of ThingPark China, a collaboration between Actility and Ginko Ventures, Xi’an Beilin District Government and Shaanxi Radio and Television Network Group, to develop interoperable IoT applications based on scalable LPWANs.
There were also gains resulting from ZTE’s deployment in China through the LoRa Application Alliance (CLAA), leading to LoRa networks in 40 Chinese cities for various municipal applications.
This came before China’s explosive start to 5G deployment, which has led to a huge push behind NB-IoT (which, though 4G-based, often accompanies a 5G roll-out, at least until the 5G-IoT successor standard is fully commercialized). Indeed, China’s 5G roll-out has promoted NB-IoT against LTE-M for cellular LPWAN, but is also threatening to squeeze out LoRa, while Sigfox never got a foothold there.
China Telecom has now built the world’s largest NB-IoT network to date after upgrading over 300,000 base stations around the whole country. There are now well over 100m NB-IoT devices deployed in China for those lighter applications across metering, wireless parking, environment monitoring, smart lighting, consumer appliance connectivity and also bike sharing, which is big in China. It is operating in 800 MHz refarmed spectrum for 4G in China with good indoor coverage to increase its target field.
It is worth underlining that most operators themselves are ambivalent or agnostic over LPWAN and often support two or more. Their choices are also geared to the markets so that telcos offering services in multiple countries might offer LoRa in one but NB-IoT in another.
France’s Orange is a case in point, having favored a combination of LoRa for less critical low power services and LTE-M for more demanding cases in most countries including its domestic market. But in Belgium, where rival Proximus has the LoRaWAN field sewn up, it offers a purely cellular LPWAN package of NB-IoT and LTE-M.
Other major operators, such as Vodafone and Telefonica, are now majoring on the cellular duo more widely. This leads back to Bong at UnaBiz with his call for unity between Sigfox and LoRa. “They are fighting for a pie that is getting smaller everyday – because of the cellular world, which is backed by all the giants of the industry. Suddenly, these two camps have realized what is in front of them – all the cellular industry, lined up against a bunch of small disruptors, promoting ultra-low-cost IoT. So, we hope – I hope – for some synergies.”