The battle for supremacy in LPWAN is big business

This article is from the CW Journal archive.

LPWAN, or Low Power Wide Area Network, is one of the plethora of acronyms at the heart of excited discussions about the Internet of Things. CW's LPWAN CWIC-Starter aimed to strip away the plethora of acronyms to explain the different options and how IoT might affect business.

Delegates gathered at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, which boasts its own LPWAN base station, on Tuesday, 28^th March.

Tim Whittaker of Cambridge Consultants, one of the four champions of the CW Connected Devices SIG who developed the day's agenda, kicked-off with a review of current LPWA connectivity options saying, "IoT is not a technology. It's really about business cases."

Any choice of wireless technology will be influenced by required communications range, the volume of data that needs to be sent, and the available power.

A ten-year battery life was a design consideration for three new LPWA connectivity options standardised in 3GPP Release-13. Mobile operators aim to offer these in competition to Sigfox and LoRaWAN, the early pace-setters in this field.

LTE Cat-M1 (aka eMTC) is a simplified form of LTE, offering up to 1Mb/s – the highest throughput of any LPWA technology. Whittaker warned that mobility comes at a price: "You will not get a ten year battery life with mobility."

NB-IoT, which evolved partly out of the Neul technology developed in Cambridge, can be deployed in guard-bands on mobile networks and can deliver up to 144kb/s in both directions. It is simpler and less power-hungry than Cat-M1 but delivers the same energy per bit.

The third 3GPP option, EC-GSM-IoT, is an evolution of GPRS with a maximum throughput of 10kb/s but may have a limited window of opportunity as the sun is beginning to set on 2G.

The trail-blazers operate in unlicensed spectrum – 868MHz in Europe. Sigfox was designed for apps that required short bursts of data, typically up to 12 bytes, a few times a day.

Downlink transmissions are limited to a few packets per day which effectively rules out over-the-air updates (for security credentials, for example) to Sigfox IoT devices.

As a spread-spectrum technology, LoRaWAN benefits from better interference immunity compared with Sigfox and is optimised for occasional messages of a few tens of bits.

LoRaWAN can be deployed on a DIY basis: anyone can buy their own base station. Many base station operators are joining crowd-sourced networks such as The Things Network. Other DIY options include IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Long Range, which with a claimed range of 2-3km (line of sight) will be part of Bluetooth v5.x.

Nick Hunn of WiFore Consulting outlined some imperatives for a successful LPWAN IoT value-chain: low-cost hardware and modules, simple provisioning, up-front data plans, and connectivity options that work globally with no reconfiguration.

He observed that while there are now four technologies that claim to offer battery lives of ten years, there is a question as to whether any of the networks will last ten years!

He counselled delegates not to get hung up on technology choices, but to deploy devices and start collecting data. "Choosing your low-power WAN isn't the stumbling block. Just go and do it," he said.

Hunn outlined the many layers to an IoT application and stressed the importance of building teams and partnerships to pull together the required expertise.

He also noted that data cleansing will be a major part of IoT. "If you're still doing your data analytics on an Excel spreadsheet you're probably not quite ready for the IoT," he warned.

Paul Green of Iotic Labs introduced the concept of 'Metaplatforms' – environments where data from many different 'things' can be shared and mashed together. He likened his company's Iotic Space to eBay which, by providing some governance, creates trust and gives people the confidence to transact. Iotic aims to be a safe place for people to find and exchange data which has context.

Anthony Rix from 8power joined his fellow CWIC organisers in a Q&A in which they shared their views on the IoT opportunity.

While forecasts of billions of devices by 2020 may be a little optimistic, Rix said, "There are thousands of niches that could each consume millions of devices."

He advised delegates to identify good business cases and target one or two vertical markets with services specific to their needs. "It's important to work out where you add value," he concluded.