Steve Rogerson talks with Dana Cohen from Sony Semiconductor about the various standards competing in the cellular IoT space.

Sometimes I feel more than a little sorry for the learning curve any business has to go through when looking at stepping into the IoT world. To someone on the outside – actually on the inside too – it must look immensely complicated with various different standards competing and complementing each other.

Not only do they have to decide whether to take a cellular or non-cellular route – not obvious for many applications – but even within those groups there are still choices with which to grapple. Take non-cellular, probably the simplest of the two, where many are saying LoRa-based installations have now effectively won the battle of the standards, but Sigfox has not gone away and its owner Singapore-based UnaBiz was only this week bragging about its achievements (www.iotm2mcouncil.org/iot-library/news/iot-newsdesk/energy-visionary-backs-sigfox-owner-unabiz).

When we come to the cellular side, which many now feel will win the overall war, but not for a long while, life gets even more complex with LTE-M, Cats 1 and 1bis, NB-IoT and so on working in a moving landscape as the mobile industry transitions through the generations 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G, with 6G on the horizon.

This was the main topic of a chat I had last week with Dana Cohen, product marketing manager at Sony Semiconductor (altair.sony-semicon.com) in Israel. This is the company that was originally Altair Semiconductor when it was founded in 2005 by former Texas Instruments executives and was acquired by Sony in 2016. It specialises in LTE chipsets.

“It depends on the application,” she told me. “But some applications see cellular and non-cellular technologies competing against each other. Take smart meters, we see all the technologies, standard and non-standard, and some proprietary protocols.”

For asset tracking, she said the choice was normally more straightforward in going for cellular as it gave a direct connection to the network; this can be essential in applications such as logistics where the tracking takes place over a long distance. It is not so crucial in a fixed area, say tracking pallets in a warehouse, where non-cellular technology can work.

However, even with the cellular option, long-distance logistics often needs back-up from non-terrestrial networks – satellites. Dana said this combination was now allowing some companies to offer close to a fully global coverage, even switching between cellular and non-cellular networks such as LoRa. She acknowledged though that satellite coverage that can be handled by low-power and low-cost devices had gaps, but said these would be filled within a few years.

Power consumption, she said, was one of the main factors any company should consider when deciding which IoT flavour was best. In the cellular world, this is where LTE-M shines, especially for logistics asset-tracking applications. However, the other consideration is data throughput, and whether voice communication is also needed.

“In this case, you would probably go with Cat 1 and Cat 1bis,” Dana said.

Longevity is also an issue with LTE-M being governed by 3GPP standards and thus included in 5G making it future proof for 15 years, maybe more; Cat 1 is not. Probably an idea here is to talk with your network operator to see what their plans are, if they will tell you.

“Some will move to 5G as a standalone and shut down 4G,” Dana said. “Some will operate 4G and 5G in parallel, but that will cost them more. Each operator will need to make that decision. The trend is moving forward and we will see 5G move to 6G. Cat 1 has no route forward.”

Well, not exactly. There is RedCap, or rather the enhanced version of RedCap known as eRedCap that is designed for IoT applications currently using Cats 1 and 1bis and is likely to hit the market in 2026.

Generally, Dana feels cellular options are “growing nicely” compared with non-cellular alternatives such as LoRa. But she admitted: “There is no one technology that can fit all. Search Google; there are lots of tables showing the pros and cons of each. There is no one right answer. It depends on the product and application.”

So, back to those poor companies dipping their first toes into the IoT soup. For many, they have no choice but to go with IoT if they want to remain competitive, and that crosses almost all vertical sectors from retail to transport, from smart cities to smart homes and smart meters, from asset tracking to health, and for multiple combinations of all of these.

These firms need to pick a side; there is no point in waiting for the fog to clear to show which IoT path to follow.

As Dana said: “We will be like this for quite a while.”