A recent prediction form research firm IoT Analytics, stated that active global IoT connections will grow from 7 billion in 2018 to 22 billion in 2025. As this occurs, many are also predicting that low power wide area networks (LPWAN) will become a key contributor to this growth. The conventional thinking here is that these technologies provide low-power, low data-rate communication over long distances or from deep indoor environments. This allows battery-operated devices to operate for up to a decade at a time without any human intervention. As such, NB-IoT, LoRa and Sigfox are emerging as the most popular LPWAN technologies as measured by end-user adoption as well as ecosystem support. The following article does a very good job of adding more depth and detail about how and why LoRa is winning.
The Internet of Things continues to expand rapidly—just last year alone it was estimated some 7 billion IoT connections were active. As the proliferation of IoT devices and solutions continues to grow, networks are fighting for position to be the premier resource for connectivity. And while these companies quarrel among itself, analog and mixed-signal semiconductor firm Semtech continues to quietly do its own thing and establish a firm position within the market.
Case in point: this past week the company announced growth in demand for its LoRa devices with the collective deployment of nearly 80 million LoRa-enabled end nodes at the end of 2018; that’s a 60% year-over-year growth. Semtech further announced it plans to ship hundreds of thousands of LoRa-based gateways, too, by early 2019.
