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The LPWAN race – time to stop mudslinging and see the bigger picture

The Internet of Things is without question the buzzword in ICT. The 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain took this to a new level, writes Brian Partridge, the research vice president at 451 Research. The high level prioritisation that IoT holds among major ICT suppliers would have the uninitiated believing that IoT is accelerating everywhere. Of course it’s not, as anyone with P&L responsibilities attached to IoT growth in 2015 would attest.

It certainly feels like the entire ICT supply side has pressed go on their IoT marketing and messaging – any hold outs at this point are sitting out the party. The good news is that all of the marketing/sales and technology R&D focus is driving incredible innovations at the device, bandwidth, cloud, analytics, edge computing, middleware platform, and network aggregation layers while costs fall precipitously in all categories. At the same time, the buy-side is waking up to the new possibilities afforded by IoT.

One area that is particularly hot is the low-power wide area network space. The low-power wide area network (LPWAN) is the term coined to describe a growing mash-up of standard, semi-standard, and proprietary WAN alternatives delivered in either public or private models that solve the inherent connectivity challenges of both today and tomorrow’s Internet of Things.

There are three technical paths here – one is the modification of existing licensed spectrum technologies such as GSM and LTE and ultimately 5G to meet the needs for low-cost and long battery life. Next is a path that uses ultra-narrowband ISM band technology based on emerging standards such as LoRa or Weightless-N that are promising to build out supporting ecosystem via vehicles such as the LoRa Alliance and Weightless SIG. The last path is the working directly with companies building out public networks using either an emerging standard or a proprietary standard such as those invented and run by Ingenu and SIGFOX.

The LPWAN race is getting heated and “mine is better than yours” mudslinging amongst the different camps is understandable but ultimately counterproductive to the larger issue – how to pull in the businesses that will bring with them the eventual billions of “things” onto these ultra-economical networks over the next decade.

The market is currently too focused on the bottom-up view technology arguments – clearly more energy must be applied to application and business model questions that loom. Some segments of the industrial market will take advantage of these technologies with very little prodding, they have no need to be sold on the business case for automating meter readings or connecting assets as they have already been doing so with alternative radio technologies, private networks, or even fixed connectivity.

Those markets are measured in the millions of connections. To move the needle from lower case millions to uppercase billions will require the invention of entirely new service models and/or re-invention of current models.

While the potential for low-bandwidth IoT is huge, these companies, especially those with pure-play exposure to the rate of adoption in IoT will need to quickly establish the ecosystems of value-adding partners who can help make the argument for fundamental transformation of industries such as agriculture and industrial equipment while also convincing large scale customers in any new markets such as consumer electronics that an investment in a non-standard LPWAN technology path delivers enough time to market and opex benefit to warrant the risk associated with betting on relatively smaller companies vs. global operators.