Some thoughts on the new LoRaWAN roadmap to make LoRaWAN universal, interoperable, effortless – and all the things to support ‘massive IoT’ at global scale. It is called a technical roadmap, but most of it is about integration and interoperability, rather than LPWAN pyrotechnics – with key layer-two protocols (OPC-UA for Industry 4.0 everywhere, UI-1203 for water meters in North America) to work in industrial systems, and standard network interfaces and unified payload formats to do away with so much custom integration.

Which, again, covers a lot of the old headaches in IoT.

The LoRa Alliance has a bunch of work items as well to make device provisioning and network migration much easier. The idea of fleets of plug-and-play devices is neat; that’s the dream in IoT. But the ambition, and marketing, has been around for a decade, at least, and has never arrived, even if it gets ever-closer. It is the alliance’s single biggest ambition – and also its hardest task: technically feasible and commercially messy, and highly dependent on a whole ecosystem. The roadmap says things will improve – is all.

To its credit, the alliance’s greatest achievement (helped by certain others) has been to recognize that IoT is as much the ecosystem as it is about squeezing new juice out of old tech. On the latter, there is good stuff in the roadmap about extending the tech, and its application, via satellites, mobile mobile-gateways (in cars, drones, hands), and other non-traditional infrastructure to reach “everywhere” IoT, plus about (crypto) security and (API) analytics. So, it looks like a comprehensive plan, solving the right problems: fragmentation, interoperability, and coverage.

It’s just that these problems are hard. Which helps in certain ways – because fragmentation rewards technologies that make it simpler, and because no one wants five bespoke solutions. But it makes a fight of it too – because NB-IoT / LTE-M / RedCap / eRedCap are entrenched in global WAN circles, and private 5G and Wi-Fi-6/7 will fight it out in enterprise campuses, and Zigbee, Thread, and Matter live in the smart home. So LoRaWAN’s battle is to be this fourth pillar, alongside cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth – within a sizable sub-niche of the sprawling IoT market.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

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