Unlicensed IoT is really threatening mobile operators’ LPWAN future
We learned a little more about Ireland’s hunger for everything related to the internet of things (IoT) after the latest ComReg report for the first quarter of 2018 showed that the technology continues to march on.
According to its findings, machine-to-machine (M2M) subscriptions increased to 881,540, a 24.6pc annual increase, and made up 14.6pc of all mobile subscriptions in Q1 2018.
Now equating to almost 15pc of all mobile subscriptions in Ireland, IoT connections are mostly controlled by Vodafone, which has just under 50pc of the market share, followed by Three (48.1pc) and Eir (2.6pc).
Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are a battleground right now, not just involving major telecoms companies and mobile operators, but a number of new players eager to bypass the traditional networks.
Now, a report from ABI Research claims that the latter is already outstripping the established network types such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M.
The figures showed that private LPWANs, such as the European provider Sigfox, accounted for a whopping 93pc of connections in 2017.