Panellists at the virtual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month looked at the advantages of low-power wide area IoT technology. IMC executive editor Steve Rogerson reports.

The IoT is not just about a single item with connectivity or intelligence, nor does it only refer to a means of communications. It is a string that can stretch from the devices and sensors at the edge all the way through various types of protocols right the way up to the cloud.

Because of this, I was pleased to see this month that the low-power wide area IoT technology panel at the virtual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) had representatives from the different stages in this journey. The panel was organised by the IMC as part of the CES IoT Infrastructure Partner Conference.

“We were able to assemble an end-to-end ecosystem of players that could talk about the technology provided through low-power wide area networking,” said moderator Fred Yentz, CEO of IoT Launch.

Yentz believes we are the point where as we go through 2021 we should start to see an upturn in LPWA being deployed, despite most of the headlines being about 5G.

“There is a lot of talk about 5G,” he said. “Clearly it is a very cool technology. There are many, many use cases that will come from this.”

But he believes many of the IoT deployments over the next few years will be based on Lightweight M2M, NB-IoT and low-power licensed spectrum technologies; you don’t need 5G to track cows around a field. This growth is being driven by lower data costs, increased battery life and more affordable products.

“This is why I think this is an important space,” said Yentz.

Representing the device end of the string was Neset Yalcinkaya, a vice president at module maker Quectel Wireless. “This is a very hot topic,” he said.

Once you have a device, there needs to be a level of connectivity and representing that element was Gideon Rogovsky, a senior vice president at Kore Wireless. “Security of the data is a very serious side of this,” he added.

On the IoT bridging side was James Wert, co-founder and chief technology officer for Tartabit, which focuses solely on the LPWA domain. “We saw a gap in the market,” he said. “Microsoft has the strongest IoT offering among the hyper-cloud services. They have done a great job in getting embedded in many different devices. This does not do you any good if it is not suitable for the network technology you are trying to use.”

Tartabit therefore developed a way to bridge this problem. “The market is not looking for science projects but ready-to-use service offerings,” he said. “We have an offering that is ready to go out of the box. We do the hard stuff ourselves so you don’t have to figure it out.”

The final piece of the puzzle came from Microsoft itself, presented by Tom Patton, principal programme manager for Azure IoT. “Cloud platforms do not happen in a bubble,” he said. “You need partners in the connectivity space, platform space, hardware partners and so on.”

He said it was not just about putting sensors in a room, but having sensors in a room that understand that all the sensors are in the same room and they relate to the door opening and closing, they relate to the HVAC system, and so on. You need, he said, to build a digital twin of these environments to move from discrete connected assets to connected environments and connected ecosystems.

As to why companies choose LPWA, not surprisingly Yalcinkaya sees the low-power aspect as being very important as the devices are being deployed in remote places and may not be touched for years. An advantage is these devices do not have to transmit data regularly, maybe once or twice a day and for the rest of the time they are in sleep mode.

“You don’t want to be changing that battery every two weeks,” added Patton.

Rogovsky said that effectively with Cat-M and NB-IoT, global coverage had been obtained with all the major markets covered. But it is not as simple as just deploying modules. Kore, he said, could help companies figure out what they needed according to their global plan and work through differences in technologies and protocols. But he admitted it was still work in progress and every month there were new devices that could help.

Patton said without a global SIM strategy you were in for additional complexity and more complicated invoicing and business relationships.

In summary, Wert said: “Every day I hear more stories about new innovative LPWA use cases both in the licensed space that we’ve been talking about and in the unlicensed space. We see a bright future.”

Bright, definitely. I can’t help but be impressed every week with stories of how IoT technologies are being deployed, from checking rat traps to, yes, monitoring cows. I am sure in the coming months and years we will all be astounded by new applications. Moo!