Six years after LPWAN became popular, what happened to non-cellular IoT technologies?

If you have to ask when LPWAN entered the public eye, it was probably in 2016.

At that time, Sigfox, a startup born in the suburbs of Toulouse, France, came into people's view. It formulated an ambitious plan to build a global network dedicated to the Internet of Things that runs parallel to the LTE network. In the past few years, it has tried to enter the Chinese market many times, but it has not been successful.

At the same time, Ingenu, an American company that seemed to have superb technology, a strong team, rich development experience and a complete enterprise chain, planned to seize China's LPWAN market with its RPMA technology and planned to expand the IoT infrastructure to the whole of China based in Wuxi. After struggling for a few years, it finally did not make much splash in the domestic market.

In addition, six years ago, Symphony Link, Weightless-N, Weightless-W, Weightless-P, NWave, Telensa, Platanus, Cynet and other technologies also came into our sight from time to time. However, these technologies ultimately failed to leave impressive achievements in the Chinese market.

The LPWAN world is unbreakable

Non-cellular IoT connectivity technology for Flowing Water?

In the world of LPWAN, we are accustomed to dividing the technologies into cellular technology and non-cellular technology.

To some extent, the development of cellular LPWAN technology is relatively clear. Once upon a time, NB-IoT and eMTC were regarded as two very important growth poles in the Chinese LPWAN market. However, after several years of development, operators have changed their development direction and abandoned the development of eMTC. In the end, eMTC lost the possibility of development in this domestic market. Of course, while developing NB-IoT, LTE Cat.1 is also being vigorously developed to meet some market demand.

When it comes to non-cellular technologies, these technologies can largely solve the problem of large-scale and wide-coverage network connection for IoT applications, make up for the shortcomings of traditional cellular technologies, and further promote the application and large-scale deployment of the IoT.

After years of observation, this part of the market has relatively large changes. As mentioned above, some technologies have been eliminated by the market due to their lack of fit with market development, while some technologies, such as LoRa, ZETA, ADC, and interBow, have achieved positive development. The technology is constantly being updated and optimized, and the application continues to expand to more vertical fields. The industrial ecology is gradually expanding. Of course, there are also new technologies that are spawned by market demand, such as WIoTa, TPUNB, ChirpIoT™, TurMass™, and LaKi.

A sentence or paragraph to understand the top ten non-cellular low-power long-distance communication technologies

In the non-cellular low-power long-distance IoT technology market, perhaps because the "old technology" market is maturing, everyone is focusing on practical work, while the "new technology" is still in its early stages of development and is in the process of expanding its market awareness. As a bystander of the non-cellular low-power long-distance IoT industry, I have a personal feeling that the industry's enthusiasm for this type of technology seems to have receded slightly in the past year.

But is this really the case? Perhaps we need to have a deeper understanding of the overall development of this industry before we can draw a conclusion. Before that, perhaps we can first understand these new and old technologies through a sentence (paragraph):

LoRa: After several years of development, LoRa technology has established its position in the field of low-power, long-distance IoT technology, and has been recognized by the industry at the communication level. From the perspective of the global market, LoRa's overseas market development is gradually rising, and the market focus is shifting. From the perspective of the industrial chain, companies in the industrial chain continue to strengthen their layout of the entire industrial chain, and the division of labor in the industrial links is no longer so clear. A LoRa company can assume multiple roles at the same time and provide a variety of products and services. From the perspective of application areas, innovative applications continue to emerge, and have expanded from the initial low-value service model based on objects to high-value services centered on human needs, and then gradually reversely penetrated into the model of objects.

ZETA: ZETA has been recognized by the market because its power consumption and cost are highly consistent with the needs of supply chain logistics, low-value asset management and other industries. Especially in the field of logistics visualization tracking, such as the large-ticket LTL market, ZETA has a large room for business expansion. At present, in the fields of energy, smart cities, water conservancy and industry, power grids, etc., ZETA's wide area networking is also a good domestic alternative.

WIoTa: WIoTa is a communication protocol optimized for wide-area wireless IoT communications. Its core is to provide deep optimization for large coverage, low power consumption, large number of connections, and low-cost applications. At present, WIoTa To B application scenarios include smart farming, smart meters, smart agriculture, smart energy, environmental monitoring, industrial Internet of Things DTU, etc.; To C application scenarios include smart home, smart wearables, voice intercom, etc.

• TPUNB: TPUNB is a domestically produced wireless narrowband IoT communication system that has a full-stack communication system for IoT application scenarios from the physical layer to the application layer. The IoT sensing system based on the TPUNB new metropolitan IoT private network can connect a large number of ecological sensing terminals and is widely used in smart cities, digital villages, industrial IoT and other fields, promoting digital empowerment in various industries.
• ChirpIoT™: ChirpIoT™ technology is a wireless communication technology that optimizes and improves linear spread spectrum signals to achieve long-distance transmission. Based on actual application needs, it can be widely used in smart agriculture, smart industry, public utilities, smart cities, smart communities, modern logistics and other fields and industries.
• TurMass™: TurMass™ is a set of low-power long-distance transmission technology and networking system. It is an ultra-large capacity narrowband transmission technology based on large-scale antennas. Currently, it is mainly used in several application fields such as smart lighting, smart fire protection, smart construction sites, smart mines, industrial Internet of Things and satellite Internet of Things. In addition, TurMass™ can also be used in the digital walkie-talkie industry.
• LaKi: LaKi focuses on solving the problem of low-cost large-scale coverage of the last kilometer of the Internet of Things, including the complete wireless communication technology of the protocol layer LaKiplus and the physical layer RF SoC chip. Laki is suitable for large-scale deployment of high-density terminals and IoT application scenarios with high requirements for response speed and power consumption, such as remote control, real-time inventory, indoor positioning, P2P voice, etc.
• ADC: The ADC protocol is a decentralized self-organizing network protocol based on the ant colony algorithm. It is a short-range wireless communication technology based on radio frequency, low cost, low power consumption, high reliability, easy to deploy, and suitable for self-organizing networks. At present, the ADC protocol and related products have been implemented in local area network scenarios such as smart homes, smart hotels, smart elderly care, and smart buildings.
• interBow: interBow has the characteristics of low power consumption, long distance, wide range, strong penetration, etc. interBow has ultra-high industry expertise in the cold chain transportation industry, mainly focusing on four vertical application areas: smart vaccine cold chain, hospital Internet of Things, pharmaceutical supply chain and GSP verification, and food cold chain.
• Sigfox: Although no longer in the arena, it still has its legends. The reason why Sigfox fell into the dilemma of "starting high and ending low" is mainly related to its own operations and strategies, especially the way it insists on network construction and operation.