P.S. The intent of this post is not to say which technology is better or worse. But, rather to show how Cellular IoT and LoRaWAN complement each other. At Actility, we deliver solutions that cater to both LoRaWAN and Cellular IoT.
Battery lifetime is by far one of the most important considerations for LPWAN applications. The reason being that when you deploy loT of sensors, it is very expensive to replace batteries physically and will ruin the ROI if the end-devices last only few years. That is the reason every technology whether LoRaWAN or Cellular IoT (Cat-M1, NB-IoT) all seem to claim the battery lifetime of 10 years but do not clearly state the traffic pattern of the device and how far the device is located from the base station/Gateway. In this article, I shed some light on how LoRaWAN has much lower power consumption to NB-IoT. More importantly, NB-IoT can address more premium use cases that involve higher throughput that cannot be addressed by LoRaWAN. There is no right or wrong answer, the requirements of the application are what determine which radio connectivity to use.
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