15 2015
LoRa® Alliance Technical Marketing Workgroup
6
COMPARING LPWAN TECHNOLOGY OPTIONS
ere is a lot of activity in the IoT sector comparing LPWAN options both from a
technical comparison but also from a business model perspective. LPWAN networks
are being deployed now because there is a strong business case to support immediate
deployment, and the cost to deploy the network in unlicensed bands requires much
less capital than even a 3G soware upgrade. e questions that should be answered
to compare different LPWAN technologies are:
• Flexibility to target a large variety of applications
• Is the communication protocol secure?
• Technical aspects – range, capacity, two-way communication, robustness to
interference
• Cost of network deployment, cost of end-node BOM, cost of battery
(largest BOM contributor)
• Ecosystem of solutions providers for flexible business models
• Availability of end-products to ensure ROI of network deployment
• Strength of ecosystem to ensure quality and longevity of the solution
