Yury Birchenko, CTO at NWave, shared successful examples of LPWAN technologies and explained how to choose the right LPWAN at Digital Catapult's LPWAN London Meetup.

1. everything is connected
LPWAN Use Cases: Making Tech Choice
Yury Birchenko
CTO

2. 2
• Iridium Satellite network launched
November 1, 1998
• Use Case: Wireless phone calls
from remote location A to remote
location B
• The company went into bankruptcy
in nine months after launch, on
August 13, 1999
• Bankruptcy filling cited "difficulty
gaining subscribers"

3. 1,500 Trillion Litres
annually
Wasted in US agriculture
40% Water Use
Reduction
By precision irrigation
3

4. Prohibitively costly $500+/pcs
Existing senosr monitoring solutions
4
Bulky
solar panel powered
Do not scale
to ~ 2-3 spots/ha monitoring
Proprietary / not universal
designed by sensor vendors for
own model range

5. Precision Agriculture Data Logger
5
Development of soil water balance model based on crop type and data
from soil moisture sensors
Technical
• Universal (any sensor)
• Long range (20km)
• Compact & Easy to
Connect: fits in the palm of
hand, IP66, no cable glands
All inputs for
photosynthesis modeling
• Soil moisture & temp.
• Air humidity & temp.
• Solar radiationKey objectives
• save hundreds of pounds per hectare on irrigation
• early yield prediction and management

6. 40% More Parking
Revenue for Cities
30% less driving
10% CO2 reduction
6

7. 7
Extreme IoT Challenge
Detection Accuracy > 99%
Mechanical Design

8. Data Analytics Prize: 28 bays at Finsbury Square, London
• Average Stay
Duration – 72 min
• Average Bay
Utilisation - 54%
• Total Value of Stays
£5K/week
• More than 100
overstays per week
8

9. 9
• The handsets could not operate as
promoted until the entire
constellation of satellites was in
place
• Reception indoors was difficult and
the bulkiness and expense of the
hand held devices when compared
to terrestrial cellular mobile phones
discouraged adoption
• Source: Wikipedia

10. LPWAN Technologies Competitive Matrix
10
Nwave SigFox LoRa Ingenu NB-IoT
Frequency 900MHz 900MHz 900MHz 2.4GHz 1.8-2.7GHz
Sensor/ Base
Station
20,000 1000 64 41 20,000
Open or
Proprietary
COTs
hardware/open
interface
Proprietary PHY
and transport
layers
Proprietary
chipset and
PHY layer
Proprietary
chipset, PHY
and transport
layers
Open
Battery life 10 years 10 years 10 years 10 years 5 years
Link Budget 166dB 156dB 151dB 163dB 143dB
Business Model
2-3 vertical
applications
based on
underlying
platform
Global public IoT
network
operator, no
apps
Chipset driven
ecosystem,
mainly small
private
networks
oriented
Global public
IoT network
operator, no
apps
Cellular IoT
network, globally
available in
2020, no apps
Minimum end
node cost
$2 $2 $5 $5 $8