LoRaWAN established itself as a global communication technology in 2018, what comes next?

LoRaWAN has established itself as a market leader in the LPWAN space, the ease of deployment, wide coverage and lack of a reliance on an operator means that more than 60% of LPWAN connections today communicate over a LoRaWAN protocol with annual growth expected to exceed 100% every year until 2023, the LPWAN space is undoubtedly a huge opportunity for a wide range of players. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are long range networks that support low power sensors to gather data, considered to be the backbone of IoT.

Last year, LoRaWAN recorded it's 50 millionth connection, widely regarded as the point at which a technology is considered to be established, with over 80 million connections in 2019, what comes next? For years people have talked about competing LPWAN technologies, LoRa vs Sigfox and the potential for billion dollar markets, and while all of these things still exist and the threat of cellular LPWAN offerings looms large over the industry, there remains a question, after all the marketing hype, now that these are on the verge of becoming established technologies, what comes next?

I've spend the last two days at The Things Conference in Amsterdam, the worlds largest LoRaWAN conference, with over 50 speakers and 30 companies demonstrating their LoRaWAN offerings - it remains the best place to view new IoT solutions.

Now in its second year, The Things Conference is part of The Things Network (TTN) a crowd funded global LoRaWAN community. The community in itself is a fantastic example of bottom-up deployment, when no commercial operator was looking to deploy national or international networks, TTN began as a kickstarter campaign offering €200 LoRa base stations and has grown to become a global network of more than 5000 gateways in 137 countries.

The event itself is an opportunity to meet and hear from players across the IoT value chain, there were a few key takeaways I took from the event:

Making it in China

China has been the worlds largest adopter of IoT, more than 400 million connected utility meters, 100 million connected bicycles and three major operators providing wide scale IoT services. China has been ahead of the rest of the world in offering nationwide NB-IoT (a wireless standard that suits similar use cases to LoRaWAN) coverage. The widespread nature of this network means that is really is now or never for LoRaWAN to make its move. There are three large scale projects to provide nationwide LoRaWAN networks to China.

• Alibaba have big ambitions for LoRaWAN: 1 million developers, 1 million IoT applications and 1 billion connections. To achieve this they have launched a nationwide training program, partnered with major IoT providers such as RAK wireless and myDevices and built their own management platforms.
• Tencent have partnered with The Things Network to build a national LoRaWAN offering, TTN have experience in building networks around the world, while Tencent are known for their offering in several key IoT markets, including medical services, energy, retail, agriculture and manufacturing.
• Hardware manufacturer ZTE has formed a new company, CLAA, building public networks targeting different industry verticals.

All three have major backers and will be looking to roll out education programmes, conferences, events and infrastructure over the next two years to secure a large slice of this huge market.

LPWAN is moving beyond proof of concept projects

This was reflected by the wide range of attendees at the conference, of course I met people from the usual tech conference crowd - semiconductor vendors, system integrators, hobbyists and engineers, but a whole new variety of end users: train operators, metals manufacturers, These people were looking to deploy LoRaWAN solutions in 2019, or had already and were adding to their offerings. While these companies are obviously pioneers in their industries, they are all evidence of a move past the proof of concept and tech for marketing stage into real world use cases and programs.

Another excellent point from this conference was the wide range of industries in the audience, so many tech events are tech people talking to other tech people, this was a conference highlighting technology enabled solutions. I was able to meet people who had no idea what IoT was a few months ago, but were in Amsterdam to begin their journey towards real deployments, that most expected to begin in the next few months.

Gateways for everyone!

The Things Network announced two new gateways at the show, a $399 outdoor industrial gateway and a $69 indoor gateway (800 of which were given away free to conference attendees), both of this represent a significant drop in price from gateways currently on the market, and represent the growing trend of affordable gateways, there were also two gateways that operate using a Raspberry Pi for around $100, lowering the barrier to entry for both commercial and hobbyist uses.

LoRaWAN in Space

Competitor Sigfox announced at its annual conference in October that global satellite coverage would be added to its service from 2019, LoRaWAN services will be no different with a number of satellite and LoRa operators launching this year.

Oxford based Lacuna Space spoke on the main stage about their LPWAN via satellite offering using existing LoRaWAN devices and supports indoor applications though a small battery powered satellite relay (about the size of a €1 coin).

Satellite based LoRaWAN offers several benefits over a ground based solution, most importantly global coverage - ideal for cross boarder logistics and tracking shipments over water however due to the nature of the satellites visibility, there may be up to 12 hours latency on a satellite based LPWAN offering.

At the moment there are about eight companies in this space, launching a few satellites that satisfy a few customers. This number will probably shrink to three or four over the next two years as the technology and market reaches maturity and should suit the logistics industry quite well, especially for cross boarder logistics and shipping industry.

LPWAN is building a mature and stable market

The last few years of LPWAN has been headlines of "LoRa vs Sigfox", "What happens when NB-IoT arrives" or "a trillion connected devices by 2016". Now that we're moving past the hype, real business cases have developed, actual deployments have been made and people are gaining value (and ROI) from the data produced.

The next year will finally see major industries taking up large scale IoT projects, meeting real business needs and finding valuable ROIs. IoT seems to have become a real business need and no longer an interesting technology. This is further highlighted by the lack of 'bad IoT' at this years CES and a general move away from the 'put an app on everything' marker ideas that we have seen in the last few years.

Looks like LPWAN is here to stay, the move towards billions of connected devices continues.