By James Blackman

The low-power wide-area (LPWA) end of the IoT sector is characterised by the capabilities and limitations of its main connectivity technologies. But this is wrong. These technologies – the likes of LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT – should not be so easily reduced to a checklist about throughput, payload, and roaming, and so on. Such a nerdy matrix of performance parameters is too limited to capture practical issues around deploying and scaling complex IoT solutions.

There is a whole other dimension to it, which stretches out in each case around the functionality of the stack, flexibility of the business model, and dynamism of the ecosystem. So says co-founder and chief executive at The Things Network (TTN) Wienke Giezeman, the Amsterdam-based group that has helped to precipitate and unite about 30,000 gateways, hosting about 800,000 devices, on public LoRaWAN networks around the world.

These other aspects correspond more directly with the likely success of each technology, as the sector matures, he says. They describe the ‘design process’ that goes into making IoT work, and dictate the shorter-term viability, longer-term benefits, and final-term logic of ‘massive IoT’. And for all of that, read: cost. And not just the upfront calculation, but the ‘total cost of ownership’ (TCO).

Because business doesn’t care about technology; it only cares about fixing problems and making money. But it is Giezeman’s point, and he should tell it. He explains: “These technologies are presented as commodities – as Commodity X versus Commodity Y. But it isn’t that. Because you’re not choosing LoRaWAN or Sigfox, or whatever; you’re choosing Design Process X versus Design Process Y.”

He adds: “Most of the time the design process defines the TCO, and the TCO determines whether the business case works.”

If success in the LPWA market, like every market, is dictated by longer-term costs, the TTN-end of the LoRaWAN community seems to have fixed the price about right. The latest numbers from the Dutch outfit, issued last month at The Things Conference, the group’s annual shindig on the Amsterdam waterfront (forced online again because of lockdown), say TTN is routing 600 messages per second and loading-on new traffic at a rate of 60-70 per cent per year.

Giezeman says: “That is business data, flowing. And because the bandwidth is low, the value density is high. So it is the only metric that really matters. Chips-sold, devices-sold – those are not really relevant measures of success. What is relevant is that someone has coughed-up the TCO to install the sensors to keep the data flowing. And 600 messages per second, growing at that rate, says everything.”

But, as always, it is not so simple. Low-end IoT has been sold to the world on the promise of ‘massive’ scale, and failed to deliver. Of course it has; it is easy to multiply a small number by a big number, and come up with a massive one – and paint a future market around it. But easy maths does not translate to easy sales, especially when the margins are tight, the technology is fragmented, and the use cases are just so kaleidoscopic. Is it any wonder?

Speaking later, Giezeman talks about the sheer bloody-mindedness required to make it in IoT. “We’ve made a massive amount of screwups, like everyone else in IoT” he reflects. “But we’ve learned, and kept ploughing on. And at some point you succeed – and at some point you succeed more. That’s how we got here. You have to be able to embrace failure. If you can’t handle the heat, you have got to get out of the IoT kitchen.”

It takes true grit, as Mattie Ross would put it. Giezeman comments: “Because IoT is not easy; it is really hard. You have this massive cold start. But once you break out – and one in 20, maybe one in 10 break out – and once you’ve solved the business case and the challenge of scalability, it goes very fast. That is where we see this exponential growth.” Indeed, the traffic on its networks looks good; but what about that “break-out” figure, at five-to-10 per cent?

There’s the bottleneck in the mission to scale. Speaking in a keynote at the same TTN event, the LoRa Alliance talked up the growing maturity of LoRaWAN – about it going from a period of horizontal-spread, across industry ‘verticals’, to a new phase of upwards growth as early adopters become early majorities in each. Giezemen says the same, talking about its “distribution across geographies and industries”.

But the sector is young, still, and that five-to-10 per cent conversion rate for LoRaWAN sales, while anecdotal, says new maturity only describes the shift from bawling infancy to spotty adolescence. A multi-billion connected-everything, or whatever, is out of sight; the market is nowhere near stepping into the big-sized shoes it was fitted for. The LoRaWAN brigade, the story goes, are just following fastest behind, tracing these giant steps in the sand.

Giezeman comments: “People want to know about the killer app. But there is no killer app, just hundreds of them. Which is massively strong, and the reason it won’t go away, and is already delivering a lot of value for businesses.” But the problem remains: how to close the gap, cleaved by fragmentation and complexity, between the promise and the reality. “The market is sold on the hype – this idea that it costs US$10 if you order a million units,” he explains.

He says something about “an ecosystem that [consequently] downplays its partners to sell products”. The audio is snaffled on Zoom; but the sense is the IoT market has to go beyond penny-pinching on hardware, and under-valuing its componentry, to make the business case stack up. The sales narrative has to bounce from the BOM to the TCO – from the one-time bill of materials (BOM), signed-off in cap-ex, to the total cost of ownership (TCO), teased-out in op-ex.

Picking up the thread again, we hear that the cost-sensitive low-power end of the ‘massive’ IoT market has spent way too long scrimping on hardware costs just to get deals over the line. It is not enough for the system to scale, and scale is the only way for the system to work. The picture is of a frontier IoT community, struggling to make it all add up; like a ragtag of prospectors in the Old West.

There has to be another way to strike gold, reflects Wienke Giezeman, co-founder of The Things Network (TTN), speaking with Enterprise IoT Insights last month at The Things Conference, a kind of campfire cook-out for anyone digging with LoRaWAN in them IoT hills. It does not make sense, he explains, to carry on slashing IoT hardware costs, and devaluing IoT solutions, when savings stretch out over longer periods in sometimes unknowable ways.

His firm, with its volunteer patchwork of public LoRaWAN infrastructure, plus a pipe of private LoRaWAN solutions from The Things Industries (TTI), has lit a blaze for the whole IoT developer community; his event, with its “festival” appeal, affords a time to sit by the fire and tell about some tech-style promised land. So rug-up; Giezeman is stirring the pot. His story says the IoT market is missing a trick.

“That chip might cost a dollar, and yet it squeezes an extra 30 percent out of the battery, which might extend the lifetime of the device by a year – which might save $70, say, in the third or fourth year. These solutions and impacts are linked. We are trying to educate the market, to move away from just squeezing every penny out of hardware costs, to think about the knock-on impact on the TCO,” he explains.

It is worth pausing a moment just to consider the whole TTN jamboree, beamed out of a studio somewhere in Amsterdam last month, and established as a fixture in the LoRaWAN calendar and a base-camp on this ‘massive’ IoT hillside – before we consider all the little explosions it is setting off to bring the hill tumbling down. “The whole event, the whole brand – it is a bit like a festival,” reflects Giezeman. It sounds naff, but he has a point.

A timing clash means, on this day in January, Enterprise IoT Insights is running between two rooms, and two laptops tuned into two events; on the other side, on Microsoft Teams, there is a day-long private LTE / 5G agenda, hosted by core network provider Athonet. It’s a great event, no question; packed with quality content. Everyone who is anyone in the private networking game is here, it seems, and most are presenting..

But it is an entirely different experience. The Things Conference is running all week, by contrast, with a mixed bag of blue-sky keynotes and down-and-dirty workshops; the chat function, running on a bespoke conferencing platform, is busy. Like at no other online event we’ve been to. Greetings from London; greetings from Lagos; greetings from L.A. – everyone checks-in, and chatters through, and most presenters chip-in as well.

Plus, there’s a nifty late-afternoon networking platform, which gets fairly lively – and almost works as a substitute for a round of Amstel and a catchup over pastries. (Late lockdown; we’ll take anything.) Look; here comes Giezeman, in some kind of retro-PC arrangement (see image). Who else could make this work? Not Semtech, not the LoRa Alliance; no one from the traditional cellular industry, certainly; maybe no one at all.

Giezeman explains, on Zoom, the TTN setup and philosophy: the business remains ‘independent’, he says, with private investors that recognise “IoT is a team sport”, and freedom in its relationship with Semtech and the LoRa Alliance, as vested interests in the LoRa ecosystem, to be critical and take criticism. “It makes us stronger. Which is important in this many-to-many relationship,” he comments.

“This hype about future profit has invited a lot of investment into the market. But we always knew it wasn’t a high-margin game, and that it would be hard to scale. Our mantra is to build together, which is not the way the private equity market works. They will tell you: ‘What, build it together? No way – we want it all.’ But this is not a zero-sum game, and if you’re wired to think that way then you are going to have a lot of bad nights.”

The concept of ‘co-creation’, which is struggling to find root in IT / OT crossover in industrial IoT (and lately in telecoms / industry crossover in private cellular), has been a tenet of community-based open-source IoT development from the start. To an extent, TTN / TTI reflects the LoRa ecosystem and the LoRa ecosystem reflects it back, insofar as it is driven by top-down standards and development but is also shaping the technology and community itself.

Which gets back to this discussion about how, exactly, the LoRaWAN brigade can educate the market about the TCO of their various low-power IoT wizardry. Let’s start with Exhibit A, a multi-purpose multi-sensor IoT unit called the Generic Node, unveiled at The Things Conference, which can be configured in software for a range of IoT use cases over-the-air. It is being offered by TTI, and features the work of Arm, Arrow Electronics, Microchip, and TWTG.

The point is the engineering is finished and the supply chain is compressed before the unit is even specified for work. Whatever the discipline, whatever the sector, the hardware is ready-to-go and the software can be provisioned, over and again, in the field “on any LoRaWAN network in the world”. It removes complexity and risk (and associated cost) from hardware development, the story goes.