At Avic, we believe that the future will show the expansion of NB-IoT and LTE-M over other proprietary LPWA technologies in the field. One of the reasons will be cost and the ease of use.

Another will be coverage and reliability. Like LTE-M, network upgrades will enable NB-IoT growth through already existing towers, making the migration easy. And while many other technologies might be highly applicable for many IoT deployments, the lack of a global coverage will limit the usability. NB-IoT, with fewer such restrictions, will be the big player in the expanding IoT market.

The bottom line for customer choice will come down to cost and coverage. Until global standards emerge, many players, both licensed and not, will compete in the enormous IoT marketplace. It’s an important decision whether to be locked into a low-cost, proprietary system or to go with an IoT service provider linked into multiple carriers, thus providing seamless reliable, low-cost connectivity coverage.