Currently, it has become a fact that there are more than 100 million LoRa terminal access nodes globally. Relevant reports predict that by 2025, the number of LPWAN connections in unlicensed frequency bands worldwide will grow to approximately 400 million.
As the world’s largest IoT application market, China hosts about 50% of the deployment of LoRa terminals. So what is the domestic development situation? What are the development trends in recent years? These issues are crucial to the development of the entire LoRa industry.
Looking at the development of LoRa from the ecological characteristics of LoRa industry
Throughout the development of the LoRa industry in recent years, the following characteristics have emerged:
The LoRa industry ecosystem is diversified and the ecosystem is becoming increasingly powerful. The participation of industry leading players (such as Internet giants, telecom operators, etc.) has played a decisive role in the expansion and prosperity of the entire ecological chain, making the ecological development more rapid and promoting the implementation of LoRa applications in various industries. Excluding these leading players, the companies in the LoRa industry chain are mostly innovative and entrepreneurial companies that are small in scale and have a short history of establishment.
LoRa application scenarios are becoming more and more diverse, and its applications are expanding into more subdivisions. In the early stages of LoRa development, the main application areas were meter reading applications such as water meters, gas meters, and electricity meters. But LoRa is not a technology just for meters. In recent years, LoRa’s “tentacles” have begun to extend to more application fields, and hundreds of implementation cases have been developed, especially in some B-side industries, such as Energy, public security, smart buildings, electric power, military industry and other industries. Currently, LoRa technology is also being used in indoor scene applications, which will become the most anticipated market for LoRa.
The LoRa industry ecology is more open, with the chip and platform links being the most prominent. The addition of more companies in different fields and sizes to the LoRa ecosystem is a reflection of its ecological openness.
- In terms of chips, the monopoly of LoRa chips is regarded as an important reason restricting the rapid development of LoRa in China. In this regard, LoRa chip manufacturers have already started licensing chip IP.
- In terms of platforms, some IoT platforms have begun to open up to third-party gateways and access networks. More gateways, modules, and sensors can be quickly connected to achieve scale. Through the efforts of these platform-level manufacturers, the process of opening up the industry chain will be promoted.
Six predictions about the LoRa industry
Although the LoRa industry has experienced several bumps in the previous development process, from the perspective of the industry chain level, application level, product level, etc., in the future development, LoRa will still be an important member of the LPWAN army. .
1. China’s LoRa industry chain will develop in the direction of industrialization and standardization.
It can be said that the problem of fragmentation has greatly affected the development of LoRa and even the entire Internet of Things industry. Although there are currently many versions of LoRa technology-related standards on the market, it is undeniable that the development of standardization will bring huge benefits. In the future, LoRa companies may lead the demand and provide suggestions to customers to further promote the standardization of IoT-related products.
2. The trend of domestic LoRa companies tending to deploy the entire industry chain or extend development, integration or cooperation to the upstream and downstream of the industry chain is increasingly obvious.
Enterprises will strengthen profitability and the ability to control various resource elements of the industrial chain by integrating resources across the entire industry chain, thereby leveraging the synergistic effects of various industrial links and enhancing market competitiveness.
This trend is especially prominent in modules, because the added value of modules is relatively low. For a small business, only by integrating the module into the terminal can its added value be increased. The development path of most LoRa companies will range from simply making modules and base stations (communication protocols), to making terminal products and servers, to providing complete industry solutions, and even providing customized solutions. At the same time, subsequent companies entering this field will not directly make modules.
3. Enterprises begin to focus on the development of specific areas.
In fact, some solution manufacturers have realized the importance of focusing on specific fields in the past two years. Next, the entire industry chain will precipitate companies with high professionalism and in-depth understanding of industry applications in the shortest possible time. For LoRa companies, the strategy of “casting a wide net” does not work. Companies in the industry chain have slowly begun to return to rationality and use their own advantages to focus on certain sub-sectors.
4. Combination application of LoRa products.
Although the richness of LoRa products is still not enough to meet the needs of the market, we have to admit that after several years of development, the LoRa products on the market have been diversified, and a service package is provided to customers in the form of a combination. To a certain extent, it can help LoRa achieve real implementation, especially suitable for exploring the indoor market.
5. The development prospects of LoRaWAN in the domestic market are relatively limited.
Currently, in the entire LoRa market, private protocol LoRa products occupy the majority of the market share. Taking the meter market as an example, standard LoRaWAN terminals account for only about 5%. In terms of base stations, although most of the current base stations are LoRaWAN base stations, the shipment volume of the base stations themselves is not large, and only some large system-level companies can handle this link. Therefore, the development of LoRaWAN in China will be relatively flat.
Since the entire LoRaWAN market has not developed, domestic companies that make LoRaWAN modules have an even more urgent need to switch to a complete solution. This approach is also the most direct way for those module companies to maintain their livelihood without LoRaWAN module sales, and it is also a transition period for the development of the industry.
6. The industrial chain ecology will enter a new ecological component and have a new ecological branch.
Due to the dual effects of policy and market, LoRa’s development in the industrial Internet of Things has been hindered, and it has to open up new application areas. For example, indoor consumer-level application scenarios are an application expansion direction with great potential.
Consumer-grade IoT/indoor application scenarios will be an important development direction of LoRa in 2020, and its huge access nodes may be the next LoRa application field that is likely to explode. However, whether it can ultimately successfully develop consumer products will need to be verified for a period of time.
People who are involved in the development trend of the LoRa industry must also feel that in recent years, the development of the domestic LoRa industry has experienced some twists and turns, but overall it still maintains a good growth trend. In the future, LoRa’s market awareness will become higher and higher, and its development will reach a higher level.
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