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5 By Barry Manz The cellular industry is taking steps to ensure that wireless carriers, rather than Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) providers, will secure the bulk of the revenue from long-range Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity solutions. The potential rewards are enormous, as even the least optimistic analysts project that there will be at least 20 billion IoT devices in service by 2020 and far more than that once autonomous vehicles hit the streets. Although not all these nodes will be connected to the Internet and cloud, owners of those that are will be charged a fee for connecting each one. To understand how the industry hopes to reap these rewards requires an exploration of its overall roadmap and underlying technologies. The cellular industry has good reason to be confident that its solutions will fare well in the market because it has enormous inherent advantages that LPWAN providers do not. More than three decades of development have resulted in nearly ubiquitous coverage delivered by hundreds of thousands of macro-cell base stations and even more small cells. Most of this infrastructure requires only enhanced software to address the requirements of IoT, dramatically reducing the amount of new RF and microwave hardware. The industry also has enormous financial resources and support from thousands of device vendors and a single global organization, the Third-Generation Partner- ship Project (3GPP), which is responsible for standards development. Taken together, these advantages logically seem likely to overwhelm even the most aggressive LPWAN competitors such as LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and Weightless. However, LPWAN providers have been feverishly building out their networks in key areas to establish a substantial customer base before the cellular industry charges forward. LPWAN networks are considerably less expensive to build and deploy than cellular networks, and they operate mostly in unlicensed spectrum, so don't have the regulatory burdens of the cellular industry. The Long History of Cellular and IoT Contrary to popular opinion, the IoT isn't all that new, and wireless carriers haven't just started providing connectivity solutions for it. The ability to connect machines with other machines has a long history, beginning when Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems were created in the 1960s. Since then, various wired and wireless solutions have been used to connect sensor-enabled equipment such as pumps, valves, and other components in the utility, fossil fuel delivery and processing industries, and other industries (Figure 1). Some have been using cellular technology since its second generation, and Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint all offer data services based on Second-Genera- tion (2G) technology. Verizon's IoT-related revenue has been growing by double digits, generating more than $500 million in profits in 2015, even before the coming IoT-centric enhancements are in place. Figure 1: A SCADA network allows an operator to monitor the status of arsenic removal system absorber vessels in a water treatment plant. To provide available spectrum for cellular IoT service, both domestic and international carriers have discontinued or soon plan to discontinue 2G service. AT&T turned off its 2G service at the end of 2016 and other carriers will follow, ultimately resulting in a total discontinuance of 2G service by the end of 2019. In the interim, wireless carriers have been upgrading current IoT customers to 3G spectrum or more recently to IoT-centric Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology such as LTE-M, which is LTE for Machine-To- Machine (M2M) connectivity. In short, M2M and cellular have been linked for years, but the future for cellular technology lies in its road map for the future. Refining Cellular Technology for IoT The cellular industry has a solid strategy for making its technologies better suited for IoT. The overall goals of the industry are shown in Table 1. From a technical perspective, the approach is the near opposite of what is being developed for its traditional voice and data markets. That is, the next major benchmark for the industry is its fifth generation, 5G, which promises blazingly fast data rates delivered in part through channel bandwidths wider than those of today. In contrast, its plans for IoT are moving in the opposite direction, from the current wideband, high-data-rate capabilities of LTE-Advanced (Figure 2) and LTE-Advanced Pro, to extremely narrowband, low-data-rate, low-power LTE variants such as LTE-M and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT). There are similarities among these paths, as each approach aims to reduce latency, increase spectral efficiency, and dramatically simplify and reduce network and end-user hardware costs. Nevertheless, providing IoT connectivity is very different from anything the industry has faced before. Table 1 – Cellular Industry IoT Goals Metric Goal Low power consumption About a nanoamp, allowing 10-year life with battery capacity of five watt-hours Continuous device cost reduction For both infrastructure user equipment Enhance coverage Better performance outdoors and especially indoors Enhanced security Strong authentication and other features Efficient data transfer Enabled by small, intermit- tent blocks of data Advanced network design Simplified topology and deployment Network scalability More than 50,000 per base station Increased coverage Improvement of 15 to 20 dB (5 to 6 times) Decreasing data rates As low as possible while maintain QoS The Cellular Industry Crafts Its Plan for IoT Connectivity

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