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A glance at the industry events calendar indicates increasing attention being paid towards Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology. For instance, last month, in Paris, LPWAN16 (“Which technology for M2M and IoT infrastructures?”). Earlier this month, in Amsterdam, LPWA 2016 (“Make sense of the many choices for IoT networks”). And set for London this November, the LPWAN World Forum (“The future of IoT network connectivity”). So what is LPWAN, why all this interest, and what’s the relevance to Industrial IoT?
Well, as its name at least partially indicates, LPWAN is a low bandwidth, low power, wireless based network designed for connecting things over wide areas. Long sensor battery life (multiiple years) and low deployment cost are necessary attributes of a LPWAN based IoT network. Typical end uses are those involving large deployments of sensors across big expanses, such as smart metering for power and water utilities; remote monitoring in the oil & gas industry; asset tracking in the logistics industry; as well as a plethora of applications in the smart city space, from parking to lighting to waste management.
An intriguing aspect of LPWAN is the technology and supplier market, which comprises traditional providers of licensed-band cellular networks, like Ericsson and Nokia, offering technologies developed recently and specifically for the IoT market, such as NB-IoT and LTE-M that I’ve written about previously on this blog, together with a number of newer companies offering unlicensed, sub-GHz networks of which LoRa and SIGFOX are currently the most prominent.
The LoRa Alliance was set up in 2015 to promote the use of a LPWAN protocol known as LoRaWAN developed by San Jose chip maker Semtech. In keeping with the LPWAN philosophy, LoRaWAN based networks connect low-cost, battery-operated sensors over long distances. For example, a LoRaWAN gateway deployed on top of a building can connect to sensors more than 10 miles (16 km) away or to water meters deployed underground.
As a patented technology, a LoRaWAN based network requires use of silicon from Semtech (or a licensed manufacturer). However, to encourage the build-out of an ecosystem around LoRaWAN and drive global adoption, the specification itself is open and any relevant company can join the LoRa Alliance.
To demonstrate the rapid evolution of the ecosystem, at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the Alliance booth showcased over 100 LoRaWAN end products and gateway and network server options and also demonstrated a live citywide LoRaWAN network. As well as manufacturers of IoT hardware like modules and gateways, the now more than 250-strong membership list of the LoRa Alliance includes IoT solution providers such as IBM and, significantly, a number of telecom operators of the likes of Orange, SK Telecom, and Swisscom.
Last month, in Korea, Samsung Electronics announced the award of the contract from SK Telecom, the country’s largest mobile operator, to deploy a nationwide 900 MHz LoRaWAN network. SK Telecom says it is looking invest some KRW100 billion ($84 million) in IoT projects over the next two years, with focus areas including infrastructure for renewable energy installations and autonomous vehicles, and smart city solutions such as sensor-enabled streetlights that not only enable cost savings through automatic lighting level adjustment, but can also collect and send air pollution and traffic status information.
France’s SIGFOX, established in 2009 and an early pioneer of LPWAN, claims over seven million devices registered on its network across 18 countries and recently announced its intention to boost its US footprint by deploying in no less than 100 American cities before the year is out. Unlike Semtech, SIGFOX gives its technology away for free for implementation at the chip level by manufacturers such as STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, while the rest of the network infrastructure is proprietary to the company and which it sells as a service to network operators or even operates the network itself.
Just last week (June 23) SIGFOX heralded an agreement with a French boiler maker subsidiary of Bosch to connect some 100,000 boilers across the country and enable remote monitoring of equipment performance and optimization of maintenance actions. Effectively encapsulating the value proposition of a LPWAN network, SIGFOX said that a similar project attempted several years ago by its customer had to be abandoned because the broadband cellular network chosen for connectivity proved too costly for an application that does not require frequent, large data transfers.
Examining the technology and supplier market for LPWAN, in the unlicensed spectrum space, there is competition between LoRa and SIGFOX – and others like Ingenu (formerly OnRamp) and Weightless – with the technologies having somewhat different characteristics in terms of capacity, range, speed, topology, etc. And there is also competition between the unlicensed and licensed LPWAN categories.
Companies like Ericsson and Nokia see IoT as a useful and lucrative extension of their traditional cellular business and will look to encourage their existing network operator customers to adopt industry standardized (3GPP) technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M. For their part, the newer unlicensed-band LPWAN proponents point to the head start in commercial roll-outs and likely lower cost offerings, and as the SK Telecom case in Korea indicates, the support from a number of telecom operators.
Whichever way the LPWAN market does evolve over the next few years – perhaps coexistence, perhaps domination of one technology and the disappearance of others – there is clearly a bright future for networks that operate over an extended range, enable long battery life, and that can be deployed at relatively low cost for a multitude of low bandwidth IoT and Industrial IoT applications.
Well, as its name at least partially indicates, LPWAN is a low bandwidth, low power, wireless based network designed for connecting things over wide areas. Long sensor battery life (multiiple years) and low deployment cost are necessary attributes of a LPWAN based IoT network. Typical end uses are those involving large deployments of sensors across big expanses, such as smart metering for power and water utilities; remote monitoring in the oil & gas industry; asset tracking in the logistics industry; as well as a plethora of applications in the smart city space, from parking to lighting to waste management.
An intriguing aspect of LPWAN is the technology and supplier market, which comprises traditional providers of licensed-band cellular networks, like Ericsson and Nokia, offering technologies developed recently and specifically for the IoT market, such as NB-IoT and LTE-M that I’ve written about previously on this blog, together with a number of newer companies offering unlicensed, sub-GHz networks of which LoRa and SIGFOX are currently the most prominent.
The LoRa Alliance was set up in 2015 to promote the use of a LPWAN protocol known as LoRaWAN developed by San Jose chip maker Semtech. In keeping with the LPWAN philosophy, LoRaWAN based networks connect low-cost, battery-operated sensors over long distances. For example, a LoRaWAN gateway deployed on top of a building can connect to sensors more than 10 miles (16 km) away or to water meters deployed underground.
As a patented technology, a LoRaWAN based network requires use of silicon from Semtech (or a licensed manufacturer). However, to encourage the build-out of an ecosystem around LoRaWAN and drive global adoption, the specification itself is open and any relevant company can join the LoRa Alliance.
To demonstrate the rapid evolution of the ecosystem, at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the Alliance booth showcased over 100 LoRaWAN end products and gateway and network server options and also demonstrated a live citywide LoRaWAN network. As well as manufacturers of IoT hardware like modules and gateways, the now more than 250-strong membership list of the LoRa Alliance includes IoT solution providers such as IBM and, significantly, a number of telecom operators of the likes of Orange, SK Telecom, and Swisscom.
Last month, in Korea, Samsung Electronics announced the award of the contract from SK Telecom, the country’s largest mobile operator, to deploy a nationwide 900 MHz LoRaWAN network. SK Telecom says it is looking invest some KRW100 billion ($84 million) in IoT projects over the next two years, with focus areas including infrastructure for renewable energy installations and autonomous vehicles, and smart city solutions such as sensor-enabled streetlights that not only enable cost savings through automatic lighting level adjustment, but can also collect and send air pollution and traffic status information.
France’s SIGFOX, established in 2009 and an early pioneer of LPWAN, claims over seven million devices registered on its network across 18 countries and recently announced its intention to boost its US footprint by deploying in no less than 100 American cities before the year is out. Unlike Semtech, SIGFOX gives its technology away for free for implementation at the chip level by manufacturers such as STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, while the rest of the network infrastructure is proprietary to the company and which it sells as a service to network operators or even operates the network itself.
Just last week (June 23) SIGFOX heralded an agreement with a French boiler maker subsidiary of Bosch to connect some 100,000 boilers across the country and enable remote monitoring of equipment performance and optimization of maintenance actions. Effectively encapsulating the value proposition of a LPWAN network, SIGFOX said that a similar project attempted several years ago by its customer had to be abandoned because the broadband cellular network chosen for connectivity proved too costly for an application that does not require frequent, large data transfers.
Examining the technology and supplier market for LPWAN, in the unlicensed spectrum space, there is competition between LoRa and SIGFOX – and others like Ingenu (formerly OnRamp) and Weightless – with the technologies having somewhat different characteristics in terms of capacity, range, speed, topology, etc. And there is also competition between the unlicensed and licensed LPWAN categories.
Companies like Ericsson and Nokia see IoT as a useful and lucrative extension of their traditional cellular business and will look to encourage their existing network operator customers to adopt industry standardized (3GPP) technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M. For their part, the newer unlicensed-band LPWAN proponents point to the head start in commercial roll-outs and likely lower cost offerings, and as the SK Telecom case in Korea indicates, the support from a number of telecom operators.
Whichever way the LPWAN market does evolve over the next few years – perhaps coexistence, perhaps domination of one technology and the disappearance of others – there is clearly a bright future for networks that operate over an extended range, enable long battery life, and that can be deployed at relatively low cost for a multitude of low bandwidth IoT and Industrial IoT applications.