Interoperable and open networks build the IoT ecosystem at minimal cost

from Interoperable and open networks build the IoT ecosystem at minimal cost
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Lawrence Latham is the chief executive of Everynet, the provider of wholesale LoRaWAN networks for IoT. The company is building out national networks across the globe with the aim of providing robust nationwide capacity to wholesale customers at a cost that stimulates trial of new IoT use cases. Here, he tells IoT Now managing editor George Malim, how the company differs from a traditional network provider and what his plans are for developing the business further.

George Malim: Why have you decided to build out national wholesale networks?

Lawrence Latham: We realised that what IoT really needs is a means for organisations to have access to network capacity so they can trial new use cases at minimal cost. If you can bring down the cost of a trial to a few dollars per year, suddenly the barrier to trialling is removed and innovators and use case owners are empowered. Some will succeed and some will fail but the cost of failure doesn’t have to be prohibitive.

GM: Why have you chosen LoRaWAN for these networks?

LL: If you’re an operator today the choice is confusing. If you’re looking at LTE-M you need to understand how much it will cost – the upgrade isn’t free. You could also consider narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or unlicensed alternatives but the challenge of understanding the options and making a choice remains. And, you’re trying to do this at the same time as your focus in on your 5G consumer business and investing in 5G.

So much of the focus is on what happens in the US or western Europe but these markets are not representative of the other places in the world. To have LTE-M or NB-IoT, which are complementary to LoRaWAN, you have to have 4G networks in place and you need these to have ubiquitous coverage and then you need to pay for the base station upgrade.

Looking at all these different solutions may be a career-defining decision so what’s an operator to do? In the past, the operator would have taken the gamble with LoRaWAN and made the capex to build the network and own it 100%. Now though, the capex is a significant burden and owning the network doesn’t help create the ecosystem. If you do it all yourself you get all of the risk, all of the opex and all of the capex but you don’t bring partners in to share the risk and the reward and these partners, critically, are able to help in building the ecosystem.

I think low power wide area networks (LPWANs) have been mis-named, the most important thing isn’t the low power, it’s the low cost. Perhaps we should be talking about LCWAN instead because cost to me is just as, if not more, important than power consumption to achieve scale.

People talk about the network technologies without really engaging from a business economics point of view. Price elasticity really does matter and can make or break an IoT use case. Pennies matter. LoRaWAN means we can [...]

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