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With 125 million IoT connections and annual growth of 25 percent, the LoRa Alliance says LoRaWAN has moved beyond LPWAN niche status. Chief executive Alper Yegin explains why the technology is staking a claim as the wireless industry’s fourth pillar, and how a new three-year roadmap aims to broaden its reach across massive IoT markets.
In sum – what to know:
Fourth pillar – The LoRa Alliance argues LoRaWAN has achieved sufficient scale, ecosystem depth, and application diversity to rank alongside cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as a core wireless platform.
Deep, wide – From water metering and livestock monitoring to asset tracking and smart cities, LoRaWAN’s strength lies in serving lots of niche IoT applications rather than just one vertical, it says.
New roadmap – The alliance’s new three-year roadmap focuses on tighter interoperability with standards such as OPC UA and UI-1203, alongside easier deployment, migration and device onboarding.
Here’s a quick excerpt from a conversation with Alper Yegin, chief executive at the LoRa Alliance, on the back of the group’s new three-year technical roadmap for LoRaWAN – with some top-line highlights about strategy and numbers, and why the community is on a hot streak in the scrappy IoT game. There should be more installments, time permitting, but here’s the thrust, starting with a question about whether LoRaWAN has ever been in a better place.
Yegin responds: “We are more confident than ever before that LoRaWAN will be the fourth pillar of the wireless industry. I mean, just look at the numbers; look at all the applications. Outside of China, there are more LoRaWAN connections than anything else –125 million, growing 25 percent per year. And NB-IoT, which China mandated for wide-area IoT in 2019, is losing steam everywhere else. AT&T has pulled the plug; so has Docomo.
“And LTE Cat 1 bis is eating its lunch; the cellular community is cannibalizing its own. And you have an application here, an application there, and really nothing in the way of massive-scale adoption. Whereas LoRaWAN supports everything from rhino tracking to water meters, street lights, facilities management, industrial monitoring. LoRaWAN has the widest set of applications, not only among LPWAN technologies, but across all wireless communications.”
There’s a lot to unpack. As always with the IoT crowd, the bravado might be dosed with a shovel of salt. The IoT industry is so fragmented that it can be cut most ways – and any of its tech tribes can be made to look potent in the context of their own sub-segments. But the point about LoRaWAN as a “fourth pillar”, part of its roadmap messaging, is defensible: it has a critical mass and a buzzy ecosystem, and looks credible versus the rest, next to the big three.
The rest, here, are Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wirepas, Wi-SUN, MIOTY, and Sigfox, its fiercest rival at one stage, fallen on hard times (again) – and so on. The big three are cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth – all of which are big anyway, just in the context of wireless tech. Cellular is a broad church, developing different master standards (4G and 5G; 6G soon) as two (or three) track systems, souped-up for versions of broadband or stripped-back for narrowband-style comms.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth families are doing the same, in more streamlined fashions. So 125 million, say, is a drop in a much bigger ocean, of well over 30 billion wireless devices, and not much bigger in the IoT field, which harbours about 22 billion of those. These numbers are from different sources, and used only for context; they discount wired IoT devices, also. But niche-upon-niche, short-range IoT, served by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, commands the waves.
Again, rough maths, but about four in five (78 percent; 17.4 billion) wireless devices – which might fairly be described as IoT units, such as home assistants and fitness trackers – connect on these shorter-range technologies; the rest (4.93 billion), like rhino trackers and water meters, are on longer-range systems, sometimes served by LoRaWAN. But nominally, even this wide-area category might be cut a couple of ways: for throughput and criticality, at least.
And when those twin requirements are limited and pragmatic, then LoRaWAN works well – and works, also, for a wide range of applications. “We have built a technology that serves numerous applications for massive IoT – as opposed to critical IoT,” says Yegin. More categories, more niches – as defined, in fact, in 3GPP circles. He continues: “You need a licensed band for critical IoT to guarantee millisecond latencies for real-time comms.
“Like for piloting a drone or controlling a surgical robot, or for connected cars and planes – where you need to carry megabytes and gigabytes of data. That’s where you need cellular IoT. Everything else – which doesn’t have to be enveloped inside millisecond latency; where kilobytes of data per device per day is good enough – is massive IoT. And that’s basically more than 95 percent of IoT applications. LoRaWAN is serving that market.”
Some salt, again: this is 95 percent of the wide-area IoT market, maybe, where low-power (LPWAN) versions of cellular go up against a rogue’s gallery of alternative IoT technologies, mostly using unlicensed spectrum bands. LoRaWAN just looks like the best of these LPWAN contenders; its fourth-pillar claim/ambition, and its spiralling run rate, might be taken in the context of all of this. “Until LoRaWAN, those were the three pillars,” says Yegin.
“Obviously there’s another dozen wireless technologies around, but each of them has its own niche,” says Yegin. But wait: it’s all a niche; everything is a niche. What makes yours any bigger? “Yeah, and that’s the nature of IoT. Right? The IoT market is huge; but you zoom in, and it is thousands of smaller markets. There’s tracking for cats and dogs, cows and elephants, cars and people. Everything is a niche, and all of those niches are IoT.”
He goes on: “You might say 125 million is niche – compared to all the billions of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and cellular devices. But momentum shows this is not a single niche. A niche is what you get with Z-Wave, right? The smart home, and that’s it. Or with Wi-SUN, which is two niches: street lights and electric meters. Our numbers are great, especially that growth rate (25 percent per annum); the variety of applications we’re supporting is more striking.”
As an aside, those 125 million are deployed and connected, he notes – not just contracted and projected. He points to its biggest hitters, serving to stack its niches and make its case: German meter maker ZENNER Group has deployed 11 million (mostly) water meters and sub-meters; Kiwi agricultural tech company Halter has sold a million livestock monitors; Swissom, just to make the point, is doing good business to connect its bike sharing service.
French water and waste management firm Veolia has four million (also water meters, actually), as well. “These numbers add up, and we have a very long tail and wide tail.” That broad tail is, maybe, its biggest proof point; the buzziest developer ecosystem in IoT, arguably, is putting LoRaWAN into a wide variety of applications on public, private, community, and satellite networks.
The new three-year roadmap, which seeks to make LoRaWAN integrate-better with industrial standards, specifically with the OPC UA industrial comms protocol and the UI-1203 smart metering protocol, and to be simpler to design and deploy, including with easier fleet migration and zero-touch provisioning, sets out the alliance’s plan to stack these use-case applications even higher – and make good on its “fourth pillar” claims and “massive” niche sizing.
Its go-to-market channels, as with cellular operator Swisscom, are also a credit.
More to follow…
