Vendors accelerate race for low-power IoT network standards

By Rick Merritt, EETimes, Feb. 23, 2016 – 

Ingenu, the LoRa Alliance and Sigfox announced expanded partnerships for their competing low-power wide area networks at the Mobile World Congress. The LPWA nets are in a race to connect the Internet of Things at a time when cellular backers are accelerating their efforts to finish competing IoT standards.

Ingenu said it has licensed companies in 25 countries to deploy networks based on its 2.4 GHz technology. The LoRA Alliance snagged separate partnerships with ARM and a service provider in Germany for its 900 MHz network. For its part, Sigfox announced two deals to deploy a total of more than 1.2 million devices certified to run on its 900 MHz net.

As many as a dozen LPWA competitors are racing to fill a gap in unlicensed bands that cellular providers aim to plug in licensed bands with emerging standards expected to be finished this year. It's still early days for LPWA networks that have provided few details on their performance or early users. Connections to LPWA nets more than tripled in 2015 to a still modest 23.2 million connections, to Machina Research.

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