New report from Beecham Research calls for changes in enterprise IoT approach

A new report by Beecham Research, ‘An Introduction to LPWA Public Service Categories: Matching Services to IoT Applications’, has called for more emphasis on connectivity services for IoT rather than their underlying technologies.

The document aims to help enterprise companies to match Internet of Things (IoT) applications to the most appropriate public connectivity services to enable them. Beecham Research sees a growing opportunity for IoT applications that use very small amounts of data cost-effectively to drive the rapid introduction of LPWA technologies.

The report focuses on public services, being offered now or planned in the near future, which cater to this burgeoning range of very low data rate applications. These services include those from vendors such as SIGFOX, Ingenu and Senet, along with Weightless and LoRa-based services like KPN, Proximus and Orange and MNOs planning to offer cellular variants LTE-M and NB-IoT.

The report has also proposed definitions of new service attributes in terms that focus on what the services offer to the user, such as battery life and coverage, rather than on strictly technology attributes such as the frequency band being used. Beecham Research states that this is “on the basis that most users are not at all interested in and do not wish to know the technical detail” and that they want something that demonstrably works for them. The aim of this is to ensure that these service attributes can be easily correlated with the needs of the specific applications that users are looking for.