Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1442769
20 and Europe's 868MHz band. It transmits over 10 miles and backhauls data using either Wi-Fi, a cellular network, or Ethernet and a cloud server for message routing, provisioning, and network management. Sigfox Sigfox, in comparison, is a proprietary solution that owns all of its technology from the edge to the server and endpoint, supplies the entire ecosystem, and, in some cases, acts as the network operator itself. It allows its endpoint technology to be used free of charge by any organization that agrees to its terms, so it has relationships with major IoT device suppliers and wireless carriers. Sigfox continues to gain in market share, especially in Europe where its transmission length adheres to European Union guidelines. The US version has been adjusted for FCC rules. Weightless Weightless was developed as an open standard managed by the Weightless Special Interest Group. This "lightweight" protocol requires just a few bytes of data per transmission, which mirrors most IoT device communications. Weightless operates in TV white spaces below 1GHz, which became available when digital transmission replaced analog. These frequencies have the advantages of wide coverage with low transmit power from the base station and the ability to penetrate buildings and other RF-challenged structures. Weightless-N is an ultra-narrowband, unidirectional technology, and Weightless-P is a bidirectional offering that offers carrier-grade performance and security and low-power consumption. Nwave Nwave is an ultra-narrowband technology based on Software- Defined Radio (SDR) techniques operating in licensed and unlicensed frequency bands. The base station can accommodate up to 1 million IoT devices over a range of 10km with RF output power of 100mW or less and a data rate of 100bps. The company claims that battery-operated devices can operate for up to 10 years. Ingenu Ingenu (previously On-Ramp Wireless) is a bidirectional solution featuring a proprietary direct-sequence spread spectrum modulation technique called Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA). RPMA was designed to provide a secure wide-area footprint with high capacity operating in the 2.4GHz band. One RPMA access point covers 176 square miles in the US, beating both Sigfox and LoRa. It features minimal overhead, low latency, and a broadcast capability so that commands are sent simultaneously to a very large number of devices. Hardware, software, and other capabilities are limited to those the company provides, and the company builds its own public and private networks for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. As only the cellular industry and LPWAN providers are competing for supremacy in the longer-range market, it's easy to assume that the designer's job is simple when compared with that required for the many medium- and short-range solutions. With each technology, there exists substantial variables and rapidly expanding roadmaps. Will there be a distinct winner for home automation? For IoT, short- and medium- range solutions will co-exist for many years to come. The determining factors, however, will be the cost of connecting devices, the specific application, and a mixture of the perception and reality that designers realize who are tasked with implementing IoT to increasingly automate the home. Conclusion