One size doesn’t fit all – for business case flexibility you need security and connectivity choices

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

The right to use licensed spectrum costs money, payable to the body managing the regional radio spectrum allocation. Here we find the 3GPP cellular ecosystem with operators offering worldwide network coverage and equipment providers with footprint across the globe.

Licensed spectrum offers good quality of service, high reliability and low latency, and is suitable for critical or real-time control usecases. Anyone can use unlicensed spectrum and this offers a quick route to market and cost advantages for infrastructure, devices and services which are all becoming widespread, with both private and public deployments across the world.

Here we find LoRa and a several other technologies. Licensed and unlicensed spectrum both have their pros and cons and usecase requirements must govern which to select. There has been a big uptake of LoRa solutions because other unlicensed technology alternatives are either immature, have small ecosystem and deployment footprint or unsuitable business proposition, and licensed technology alternatives such as cellular NB-IoT or LTE category M1 haven’t been widely available.

Cellular options such as 3G and 4G were not really designed for low bandwidth and low energy consumption applications whereas LoRa would fit the requirements as well as offer an industry standard and a growing ecosystem of product and service providers. There’s a massive diversity in use cases which means many different approaches are required. Consider the business case options; once you have bought your cellular devices you pay a recurring fee to an operator, whereas after your investment in unlicensed technology you have a choice including a recurring fee or a no-fee model. In the unlicensed camp LoRa’s maturing ecosystem also offers cost competition resulting in a very nice business proposition for many usecases.

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