LoRa and Sigfox gain share but NB-IoT will win in the end…
ABI Research has published a report called Low-Power Wide Area Network Market Data.
It says that LPWAN communication technologies LoRa and Sigfox have extended their market share lead over the mobile network communication technologies LTE-M and NB-IoT.
Enterprise IoT Insights says that the mobile comms technologies have been “plagued by network hardware and connectivity module issues”. The same could have been said about the LPWAN technologies at the same stage of deployment. It doesn’t mean that LPWAN will win in the end.
Sigfox continues to be a popular choice for public network operations. LoRa can be used on a private network and these deployments have been increasing in number.
Utilities often prefer private networks to public ones for good reason – control. However, for a water company, it seems crazy to add another network to manage when the existing ones – clean water and sewage - already create challenges that will be replicated in a third. The cost of maintaining a network in fully working condition is expensive, and therefore it is likely that network condition on average will deteriorate.
Much better to use existing 3rd party networks which are going to receive ongoing high levels of investment to keep pace with growing demand to support mobile phone usage. In other words, much better to use mobile network communication technologies LTE-M and NB-IoT.
i2O already offers an NB-IoT logger (the first one was shipped in December 2018) and we have written a thoughtpiece about why mobile communications technologies will vanquish LPWAN. After a slow start, and once through teething troubles, mobile communications technologies will come to dominate.