Where will the development momentum of LPWAN come from in the next five years?

Author: Liu Bosong, Senior Solutions Business Manager at Avnet

summary

After five years of rapid development since 2015, LPWAN is now facing a turning point, and its original driving advantage is no longer there. Next, we must focus on LPWAN applications to seize the initiative in the next stage of development. However, to break through the bottleneck of LPWAN development, we need both innovative application development platforms and end-to-end solutions and services to enable companies to profit from LPWAN technology and applications as soon as possible. Avnet, a leading global technology distributor and solution provider, has become the key to solving the problem. It happens to provide customers with valuable and appropriate solutions and services, and work with customers to move towards the next five years of LPWAN development.

When looking back at the development history of Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN), many people regard 2015 as its first year of development. A landmark event at that time was that French IoT startup Sigfox received an investment of up to 100 million euros, and its unique vision of focusing on long-distance, low-transmission-rate, and low-power wide-area networks also made keen investors immediately aware of the huge business opportunities it contained.

After that, various LPWAN technologies emerged like mushrooms after rain. In 2016, 3GPP announced LTE-M and NB-IoT as LPWAN standards for licensed frequency bands, which was a bombshell in the market. Since then, the LPWAN field has become a very lively battlefield, with various disputes from technical and commercial perspectives, and many exciting stories.

Five years of rapid development

Such market enthusiasm has also translated into an acceleration in the development of LPWAN, making this emerging field have made considerable progress in the past five years. According to IHS research data, the total number of LPWAN connected devices worldwide exceeded 400 million in 2020, and the annual compound growth rate of LPWAN network connections from 2017 to 2023 is expected to be as high as 64%, and the total number will reach 1.7 billion.

Figure 1: The number of global LPWAN network connections is growing rapidly (Data source: IHS)

Various LPWAN technologies have gradually established their own market positions in such a rapidly developing environment. Four technologies, including LoRa and Sigfox for unlicensed bands, and NB-IoT and LTE-M for licensed bands, have gradually become mainstream. By the end of 2019, the total number of terminal devices connected by these four technologies accounted for 92% of the total number of LPWAN connected devices worldwide. Among them, LoRa has the highest share, but it is expected that around 2022, NB-IoT will catch up and become the main force in the LPWAN market.

Figure 2: As of 2019, LPWAN connected devices based on four technologies, LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT and LTE-M, accounted for approximately 92% of the world’s total (Data source: IoT Analytics)