LPWAN is booming all over APAC – but where are the use cases?

IoT LPWAN
Image credit: chombosan / Shutterstock.com

Low-power WAN (LPWAN) deployments have been popping up swiftly across the Asia-Pacific in recent months, driven by all the buzz over the Internet of Things and the revenue possibilities therein.

LPWAN technologies such as Sigfox, LoRa and NB-IoT specifically target IoT apps involving thousands and thousands of sensors and other devices that ideally should run for up to ten years on a single battery, although each technology has advantages for certain apps and deployment scenarios over others.

Even so, according to the following infographic from Charles Reed Anderson & Associates (CRA), service providers in at least 12 markets across APAC have deployed one or more of these LPWAN technologies – customers in most of the 12 often have more than one IoT connectivity option to choose from.

According to CRA, one interesting aspect of this is that customer awareness of LPWAN is strikingly high, considering that rollouts and adoption of such technologies – particularly those based on cellular network technologies like NB-IoT and LTE Cat M1 –  has only really taken off in the last year or so. So vendors have done a remarkable job of at least getting the technologies in front of customers.

On the downside, customers are also aware of the downsides and challenges of LPWAN technology, such as hardware costs and market fragmentation. But the major concerns are centered on a lack of use cases and, unsurprisingly, security – these are the chief issues that LPWAN players need to address to bring customers onboard, CRA says.

And now is the time to do it, because according to CRA infographic, the slim majority of customers surveyed are interested in adopting some kind of LPWAN technology, be it Sigfox, LoRa or NB-IoT, while less than 10% say they’re not interested. That puts anywhere from 34% to 39% of respondents in the “undecided” category – and that’s where vendors should be focusing their efforts.

To the infographic!

LPWAN infographic

This infographic was originally published at CRA & Associates

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