Internet giants are entering the LPWAN market one after another. Who has become the new trend?

In the field of low-power wide-area Internet of Things (LPWAN), a subtle change seems to be taking place.

Not long ago, Tencent joined the LoRa Alliance in a high-profile manner and announced that it would establish a LoRaWAN network in Shenzhen and would continue to invest in LoRaWAN technology and applications.

Coincidentally, before Tencent, Alibaba had already made a more high-profile performance in using LoRa to deploy LPWAN. The IoT platform based on LoRa and wireless radio frequency technology jointly built by Alibaba Cloud and Zhejiang Unicom has been put into trial commercial use; the LoRa network built by Alibaba in Hangzhou and Ningbo is also ready for commercial use; at the same time, Alibaba actively deploys LoRaWAN applications in its own business, using 4 LoRa micro gateways and 4 base stations to complete the LPWAN network coverage of the 200,000 square meters of Cainiao Park. The goal proposed by Alibaba Cloud is to fully develop the construction of LoRa networks and ecosystems, and to connect 10 billion devices in the next five years.

If we think about the fact that Google has joined the LoRa Alliance earlier, it makes people feel that LoRa, a LPWAN technology, is becoming the next hot spot for Internet giants to "hunt".

From everyone's experience, whenever Internet giants enter a field, they often use their comprehensive strength in ecology, capital, and operations to appear as disruptors. Therefore, with such a high frequency of involvement in LoRa, it is indeed worth paying attention to how they will stir up the LPWAN pool in the future.

The one that should be most vigilant about the Internet giants' entry into LoRa is NB-IoT. Since LoRa and NB-IoT are both LPWAN technologies and have a high degree of overlap in positioning, they are often compared.

In fact, from a technical point of view, the two technologies have their own advantages. However, since NB-IoT is endorsed by 3GPP and is an LPWAN that works in the licensed frequency band, many powerful telecom operators and equipment manufacturers are actively promoting it from the formulation of standards to the construction of commercial networks. Therefore, it has developed strongly in the two years since the standard was launched and is always in the spotlight. In comparison, LoRa, which was "born" earlier than NB-IoT, and other LPWAN technologies in unlicensed frequency bands seem a bit lonely.

Table 1, Comparison of NB-IoT and LoRa technology features

However, there is no such thing as a "perfect" technology in the world, and it is not easy for a technology to dominate the fragmented IoT market. The inherent shortcomings of NB-IoT have given LoRa room to gain a foothold and develop.

First of all, from the perspective of technical characteristics, there are obvious differences between NB-IoT and LoRa: NB-IoT inherits the characteristics of wide-area mobile networks, emphasizing standardization, rigor and full network coverage; while LoRa is characterized by openness, customization and flexibility.

The "personality" of NB-IoT determines that it is more suitable for building a large public network and establishing its own competitive advantage through economies of scale. In practice, various operators also continue to operate the traditional mobile wide area network "network construction-delivery-subsidy" routine. However, such an operation mode may encounter a soft nail in the field of Internet of Things - it is difficult to find sufficiently large-scale application scenarios in the fragmented Internet of Things market, which poses a challenge to the subsequent profitability of the NB-IoT network, and thus makes operators hesitate in continuing to deploy large-scale NB-IoT networks.

In contrast, LoRa seems to be more suitable for some specific small-scale, personalized IoT applications. From a family to a city, users can quickly build an autonomous and controllable "private network" according to their needs.

Another reason that drives users to consider using LoRa technology for networking is cost. Although there is no obvious difference between NB-IoT and LoRa in hardware module costs, LoRaWAN users can obviously save a sum of network traffic fees paid to telecom operators after having their own "private network". Moreover, for users who have urgent needs for network construction and operation and do not want to be constrained by the NB-IoT network construction schedule, the time cost saved by using LoRa is also an important factor affecting their decision.

Of course, there is another deeper reason why Internet companies are turning to LoRa, which is the competition for the right to speak in the future LPWAN industry. Although the Internet of Things has the word "network" in its name, it is not just a network, but a complete system that integrates the cloud (cloud platform), pipe (communication network), and terminal (terminal equipment).

Telecom operators at the top of the food chain in the traditional telecommunications industry are best at network construction and charging network usage fees. In the large system of the Internet of Things, Internet companies have a deep accumulation in cloud platforms, and end users as the source of big data in application scenarios will also have considerable say. Everyone certainly does not want to completely transfer the control of the network to a single standard network operator, but hopes to get a larger share in the LPWAN value chain through the game of standards and applications. This is actually the deep motivation for manufacturers that are not traditional telecommunications and cannot obtain licensed frequency band resources - in addition to Internet companies, there are also many radio and television companies - to embrace LoRa.

Therefore, in summary, coupled with the efforts of the LoRa ecosystem in recent years, it is not surprising that LoRa has won so much favor. In fact, more and more telecom operators have noticed the characteristics of LoRa and the market demands. While continuing to expand the construction of licensed frequency band LPWAN such as NB-IoT and eMTC, they have also incorporated unlicensed frequency band technologies such as LoRa into their own business systems.

For example, Verison in the United States announced that it would use LoRa in its enterprise user solutions as a supplement to the eMTC network; in South Korea, SK Telecom deployed a nationwide LoRa network in the first half of 2016 to provide commercial IoT services; in China, China Unicom IoT Company also launched the Unicom "LoRa Connection Management Platform" together with its partners to meet customers' rapidly growing demand for LoRa connection management.

In such an era of change, in a transformative industry like LPWAN, everyone should stay alert, be prepared, and wait for the day when they can stand on the cusp of the trend and ride the wind.

Figure 1. Avnet's LoRaWAN solution is based on the muRata LoRa module with Cisco gateway capabilities, further unleashing the potential of LoRA, capable of sensing and hard monitoring environmental data, and is very suitable for applications in meteorology, agriculture and other fields.