LoRa/LoRaWAN Ecosystem Overview
By: Yitaek Hwang
Tags: Lora, IoT, Internet of Things, 5g, Lorawan

An overview of prominent LoRa/LoRaWAN players

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

While 5G dominates the IoT discussions regarding networking technologies, low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies have steadily grown its presence, primarily in private deployments. According to IoT Analytics’s LPWAN Market Report 2018–2023, global LPWAN connection is expected to reach >1.1B devices by 2023 with LoRaWAN emerging as the de facto unlicensed LPWAN standard. In a study published in June 2019, ABI Research also reported massive adoption for LoRaWAN in utilities, smart building, asset tracking, agriculture, and smart manufacturing use cases.

As a software engineer at Leverege, I have been building LoRaWAN solutions since 2016 and worked on the largest commercial LPWAN deployment in North America to date. During that time, the LoRa Alliance added more than 500 member companies with more than 130 network operators in 157 countries. In this article, I’ll provide an overview of prominent LoRaWAN market leaders based on publicly available research and personal experience working with the vendors (thus, it will inevitably focus on the North American market).

Image Credit: LoRa Alliance

NOTE: If you need a refresher on LPWAN or LoRaWAN, check out “What is LPWAN and the LoRAWAN Open Standard” and “Your Primer for LoRa/LoRaWAN”.

Semtech

As the inventors of the LoRa modulation technology and the governing body for the LoRaWAN protocol, Semtech continues to push the LoRa ecosystem forward by lowering the barrier to adoption. Aside from expanding product line for the LoRa gateways and transceivers, Semtech also invested heavily in creating a developer ecosystem since acquiring TrackNet in 2018. Founded by the original authors of the LoRaWAN specification, TrackNet formerly provided a cloud-based network/application servers and was foundational in defining the LoRaWAN software specifications.

Semtech’s LoRa Developer Portal now includes several open-source packages for LoRa-based applications:

More recently, Semtech released a cloud-based geolocation service for LoRaWAN applications. The API scrapes the metadata from the LoRa packets to convert RSSI, SNR, and time of arrival information to estimated geolocations. Since the API is compatible with any LoRaWAN-compliant gateway, this new service unlocks new applications with low-resolution geolocation without GPS modules.

In general, Semtech’s resources are primarily geared towards low-level gateway, bootloader, and packet forwarder implementation. If you are an application developer simply looking to pick up a developer kit and use LoRaWAN as backhaul, other software offerings from network and application providers listed below may be more suitable.

Sensors/Gateways Vendors

While there are numerous hardware vendors supplying LoRaWAN compatible devices and gateways, I’m going to highlight a few vendors that I’ve worked with personally. Some of these vendors also provide network servers and solutions, but compared to others in network operator or solutions provider in the list below, they are primarily focused on hardware.

Multitech

In terms of dev kits, I found MultiTech’s Conduit IoT Starter Kit for LoRa to be the easiest to configure and set up a quick prototype using their mDot modules. The gateway comes with Node-RED preinstalled to connect to Azure IoT Hub or AWS IoT Core. You can buy some sensors and an XBee Shield to write small Arduino programs (extended tutorial here).

Image Credit: Multitech

TEKTELIC

For heavy-duty outdoor and production deployments, TEKTELIC’s LoRaWAN gateways consistently receive great reviews for performance and reliability. While it is on the more expensive side than Multitech or alternative DIY (e.g. Dragino) gateways, Tektelic integrates well with The Things Network or ChirpStack for application development.

KONA Mega IoT Gateway — Image Credit: TEKTELIC

Other Recommendations

I don’t have much experience with the following vendors, but gateways from these suppliers are widely used and supported by network operators:

Cisco

Kerlink

Laird

Network Operators

Going up the stack, Senet and The Things Network (TTN) are building up a global LoRaWAN network by providing a managed network server to connect and manage sensors and gateways.

Senet

Senet is the largest LoRaWAN network operator in North America with a growing global presence. Senet provides a managed public, semi-private, or private network for customers to connect LoRaWAN devices and gateways to Senet’s network server in the cloud. For Radio Access Network (RAN) operators, Senet also provides an option to deploy LoRaWAN gateways to existing towers or buildings for additional revenue streams.

Senet provides a web portal and a REST API to onboard devices and gateways. It’s simple to register new devices and base stations by providing a device EUI and choosing either OTAA or ABP activation. Senet also has a list of pre-integrated device types to choose from. If the device supports LoRaWAN FUOTA (Firmware-Update-Over-the-Air) spec, Senet can initiate new firmware upgrades via the portal or the API as well.

FUOTA UI — Image Credit: Senet

The Things Network

TTN chose an open-source route to deploy a global LoRaWAN network with over 100,000 developers building solutions on their network. As a community-driven network, the strength of TTN is the large number of SDKs (Go, Java, Node, Python) as well as integrations with popular IoT platforms and applications (e.g. AWS IoT). Users can join communities with public gateways to onboard devices and build applications.

If you need a private network, TTN also provides an enterprise version of the network server with a 99.5% uptime SLA. Users can choose between a cloud-hosted version of enterprise TTN or a self-hosted network server via cloud marketplace launcher on Azure, AWS, or GCP. The pricing depends on the number of devices and the license fee with an optional support plan.

The Things Network Architecture — Image Credit: TTN

Solutions Providers

Further up the stack, we have MachineQ and Actility providing a platform and end-to-end solutions with LoRaWAN devices and gateways. It’s also possible to use a subset of the features (e.g. network server) instead of an off-the-shelf solution package.

MachineQ

MachineQ is a Comcast company focused on enterprise IoT solutions. Unlike Senet and TTN who only integrate with existing gateway suppliers, MachineQ provides its own indoor and outdoor gateways as well as sensors optimized for MachineQ’s proprietary, optimized LoRaWAN stack. As long as the devices are LoRaWAN compliant, you can add non-MachineQ devices to the network as well.

The web portal is similar to other network providers with integrations to Azure IoT Hub/IoT Central, AWS IoT Core, MQTT, and webhook support. MachineQ provides a few ready-to-deploy, enterprise solutions in temperature monitoring, asset tracking, and facilities management, as well as partner solutions using MachineQ’s network.

MachineQ Web Portal — Image Credit: MachineQ

Actility

Actility mainly operates in Europe, but has a global presence providing cellular IoT and LoRaWAN connectivity for various IoT solutions. Since the acquisition of Abeeway in 2017, Actility built a portfolio of IoT solutions spanning from geolocation, roaming, service orchestration, and managed network server.

Actility sells IoT solution packages in greenhouse monitoring, cold chain management, and factory air quality monitoring. It also hosts the ThingParkMarket to facilitate the discovery and sale of off-the-shelf LoRaWAN devices. Most recently, Actility was in the news for providing a solution to Barcelona hospitals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Actility Hospital Solution — Image Credit: IoT For All

Cloud & Open Source Projects

As of June 2020, none of the major cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP) provide a fully-managed LoRaWAN network. The solutions either involve proxying the requests through TTN (AWS example, Azure example) or using open-source implementations to connect to gateway/edge features of the respective IoT solution (Azure example, GCP example).

ChirpStack, formerly known as LoRa Server, is the only open-source network server implementation with commercial supporters (Thingstream acquired by u-blox, TWTG, CableLabs, SIDNfonds). ChirpStack provides a Docker Compose setup for a quick start as well as detailed guides for setting up the system on Azure and GCP. All of the major features supported by the LoRaWAN specification (including FUOTA) is available on ChirpStack with great support for other open-source projects (e.g. Prometheus).

Finally, it is worth noting that Amazon is the only LoRa alliance member listed on the website with Karthik Ranjan from AWS IoT serving as a board member. (There was an announcement of Google Cloud joining the alliance as a Sponsor Member in 2018, but is not listed on the member directory.) Chinese cloud giants Alibaba and Tencent also join Amazon as prominent LoRa Alliance members with Wei Ku and Yachen Wang serving as board members.

Final Words

According to Statista, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are expected to beat out Sigfox and LTE-M to take >80% share of the LPWAN market by 2023.

Image Credit: ubidots

For unlicensed LPWAN solutions, LoRaWAN has largely delivered on its promise of low power and wide range. As the LoRaWAN market continues to mature, more use cases requiring private deployments (e.g. college campuses, smart buildings, smart factories) will come online and complement cellular IoT technologies for a more connected future.