Mobile Experts has released a report on the LPWA market. While other IoT predictions have relied mostly on speculation, Mobile Experts fragmented the IoT marketplace into small vertical market slices in order to fully understand the priorities of end users. After two years of research, they can now draw accurate, fact-based conclusions about the growing competition between unlicensed LPWA and the evolution of Cellular IoT.
For two years, Mobile Experts has held back from releasing any definitive conclusions regarding LPWA devices. Instead, its analysts tucked in to a thorough investigation of the IoT market, breaking it up into a series of vertical markets and then analyzing each in its entirety. Over 300 pages of analysis and hundreds of diagrams provided a strong basis for a fully vetted forecast.
They talked to all of the major auto manufacturers, building automation providers, smart meter suppliers as well as industrial companies like GE and Siemens and hospital groups like Kaiser and United Healthcare. Since each vertical market has very different drivers there is no typical IoT device and no typical IoT business model.
Part of that research involved the technical and business factors for each technology. Mobile Experts considered technical factors such as range, building penetration, device density, capacity, battery life, and cost. In each vertical market segment, the analysts considered the preferred ownership structure, the ROI for the end user, and time to market for customization and ease-of-use features.
The report provides a five-year forecast for LTE-M, NB-IoT, Sigfox, LoRa, Ingenu, Telensa, 802.15.4 (Silver Spring), and other formats. It provides the main conclusion about which formats will grow to hundreds of millions of devices and why.
The short answer is that only a few of the unlicensed LPWA options can thrive, because the breakeven point on a widespread IoT network is difficult to reach. Out of about 10 unlicensed LPWA options, Mobile Experts expect one to grow as a robust, broad ecosystem and two others to occupy niche opportunities. Some features of formats like Dash7 or Qowisio are useful, and can be absorbed into other technology roadmaps while others are likely to die.
The report also provides detailed information for suppliers in the IoT market, with a forecast of module and semiconductor shipments and revenue. According to Mobile Experts, connectivity module revenue will grow from about $1 billion in 2016 to about $33 billion in 2021, with volume growth in multiple markets clearly overcoming the drop in device pricing. At a semiconductor level, the revenue for MCUs and RF solutions is expected to grow to more than $1 billion by 2021.
Click here to download the report.
