ON World

120 Million Industrial LPWAN Connections by 2025

San Diego, California, May 24, 2016-- Within the next decade, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) will disrupt the industrial wireless sensor network (WSN) market and enable over a hundred million industrial Internet of Things connections, according to a recently published report by global technology research firm ON World. 

“LPWANs have distinct advantages over existing industrial wireless sensing and tracking technologies,” says Mareca Hatler, ON World’s research director.  “While network range is the most obvious advantage, the biggest strength of LPWANs over existing wireless technologies is pushing end node complexity to the cloud.”

LPWANs present an opportunity and threat to existing industrial WSN solution providers. Twelve years ago when ON World published its first industrial WSN report, WSN was a disruptor of wired industrial sensing networks and from this came mesh standards such as WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and Wi-SUN. The challenges of wireless mesh sensor networking include long product development cycles, expensive gateways and advanced network management using technologies that were developed before the cloud was mature enough to create a business model around. 

ON World’s recently completed survey with 100 industrial IoT professionals found that three-quarters are aware of LPWANs and over half are researching or developing LPWAN products and services.  

Some of the initial LPWAN innovations include:

  • Smart buttons by The Button Corporation and SYMES
  • Multi-mile low cost fuel tank monitoring by SENET
  • Smart industrial instruments and IoT platforms by EVVOS, IJINUS and Worldsensing
  • Smart farming solutions by Libelium, Senso Wave, Weenat and Yzatec
  • Animal health monitoring platform by Quantified Ag
  • Asset management by Oceasoft, Sensolus, SmartSensor Labs and Traqueur

LPWANs’ biggest impact will be on enabling new IoT markets and solutions.  By 2025, ON World projects that there will be 120 million industrial, agriculture and logistics LPWAN connections and two thirds will be unique IoT applications that would not exist without LPWAN technology.

For this report, ON World conducted several network tests to uncover the potential for LPWAN technologies including network ranges in specific application scenarios and expected battery lifetime for near real-time pressure sensor application and GPS magnetometer location smart tags.

ON Word’s recently published report, Industrial LPWAN,” is based on surveys and interviews with over 100 industrial wireless leaders and innovators.  It includes in-depth analysis and market size forecasts on 35 industrial IoT market/application segments, an evaluation of 70+ companies, the results from ON World’s survey on industrial wireless adoption trends and views on LPWANs, as well as the findings from network tests to illustrate the capabilities of LPWAN technologies.


A free executive summary is available from ON World’s website.

About ON World:
ON World provides business intelligence on Internet of Things markets. Our market research is used by Fortune 1000 companies, startups and investors worldwide.

Media contact:
Mary Purvis
e: purvis at onworld.com
ph: 858-259-2397

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