NB-IoT, CAT-M, SIGFOX and LoRa Battle for Dominance Drives Global LPWA Network Connections to Pass 1 Billion By 2023

Smart meters deployed by energy and water utilities will be the second largest vertical IoT application in 2023 contributing over one-third of the global LPWA device connections.  Early adoption from meter vendors such as Sensus, Itron, Kamstrup, Arad, and Holley metering means that non-cellular LPWA technologies are well positioned to capture two-thirds of the LPWA connections in smart meters by 2023.

Smart meters deployed by energy and water utilities will be the second largest vertical IoT application in 2023 contributing over one-third of the global LPWA device connections.  Early adoption from meter vendors such as Sensus, Itron, Kamstrup, Arad, and Holley metering means that non-cellular LPWA technologies are well positioned to capture two-thirds of the LPWA connections in smart meters by 2023.

In 2017, SIGFOX had the largest share of public LPWA connections worldwide benefiting from its first mover advantage in Europe. "SIGFOX has continued to stay a step ahead in public LPWA networks with the roll-out of the Monarch cognitive network service in early 2018. The Monarch service enables SIGFOX devices to automatically adapt to radio frequency changes allowing for seamless roaming across SIGFOX networks," Krishnan explained. Luis Vuitton's Echo travel bag tracker was the first commercial SIGFOX device to leverage the Monarch service in over 100 airports across 26 countries. In contrast, LoRa gained significant market share as a popular connectivity technology for private networks, witnessing over 54% year-on-year growth in 2017.

Private LPWA networks, built to address a single vertical application or an individual enterprise, have been a popular choice for over a decade and accounted for 93% of LPWA connections in 2017. LoRa and other noncellular LPWA technologies have benefited from the decreasing cost of IC's, low implementation costs and flexibility of private networks that can be tailored to meet specific enterprise IoT applications. LoRa has witnessed exponential growth in APAC, especially in China where ZTE has deployed China LoRa Application Alliance (CLAA) LoRa networks in 40 Chinese cities and is starting to ramp-up deployment of smart meters, parking sensors, air-quality monitoring sensors and other smart city solutions.  However, as the geographic footprint of public networks rapidly expands, cellular and non-cellular public networks will capture over 70% of LPWA connections by 2023.

These findings are from ABI Research's Low-Power Wide Area Network Market Data  report. This report is part of the company's M2M, IoT & IoE research service, which includes research, data, and Executive Foresights. 

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