As 5G Nears, IoT Connectivity Remains A ‘Wild West’

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

‘We’re dealing with a very different world where choices are long-term Investments,’ a Forrester analyst says of the big decisions companies need to make in the ‘wild west’ of IoT connectivity options, which range from LoRa and SigFox to NB-IoT and LTE-M.

But as Sprint and others have admitted, 5G is still in its infancy, meaning that IoT will continue to rely on a wider range of connectivity types for the years to come.

Andre Kindness, a principal analyst at research firm Forrester, called IoT connectivity a “wild west” where there are a variety of options to choose from.

One of the major challenges, he said, is that unlike the rest of the tech industry where devices are refreshed every three to seven years, many IoT deployments will need to last anywhere from 10 to 25 years, making the decision of which connectivity type to adopt a big one.

Many of these connectivity types provide low-power, wide-area networks, also known as LPWAN, which Forrester predicts will account for 60 percent of long-distance connections by 2025 and are optimized for long-distance communication, low-power consumption and low-cost chipsets.

In a paper, Kindness wrote on the LPWAN market last year, the researcher laid out the most important factors companies should consider when looking at IoT connectivity: chipset costs, operational model, geographic coverage, device availability, power consumption and 5G availability.

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