Competition in the LPWAN space will result in at least one of the standards being crowded out, a leading Internet of Things research firm has claimed.
In its predictions for the year ahead, Machina Research said a mix of developments across regulation, standards and commercial success would challenge the competing technologies.
Operators have been left behind as standards such as LoRa, Sigfox and Weightless have raced ahead with deployments across Europe. Orange is just one operator looking to LoRa tech to underpin its IoT network.
After a slow start, operators are moving to implement a cellular based standard by the end of 2016. Work is underway by 3GPP to standardise C-IoT technology.
Machina said: “We would expect no more than two mainstream nationwide deployments of non-3GPP LPWA networkd per country, which will limit opportunities.
“But that doesn’t mean that there will be fewer options. If anything there will be more fragmentation rather than less, with more technology options.”
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The report also predicted corrective analytics would become more common and act as a fail-safe for IoT networks. The market will also see a shift from technology and vendor specific solutions to agnostic ones.
Further, Machina claimed that the demand for spectrum will see more operators signal an end to their 2G and 3G network. Last year, several operators, including Swisscom and Telenor, gave an end date for their legacy networks.
Operators will also begin to test network function virtualisation and software defined networking for IoT networks, Machina predicted.