LoRa NTN Will Expand the Standard’s Applications and Influence, Even as the IoT-NTN Market Revs Up

The LoRa Alliance announced its new development roadmap this April, highlighting the key avenues through which the industry organization expects to grow the Low-Power, Wide Area (LPWA) standard. Satellite connectivity features prominently in the new playbook, with the Alliance expecting the protocol’s Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) capability to play an integral role in propelling the technology into new “addressable markets.”

The Alliance’s spotlight on satellite is reasonable. The introduction of direct satellite links for the standard will help the technology expand past its usual private, public, and communal deployment styles, and allow LoRa customers to have a more global footprint. However, while it is an impactful development for the LoRa ecosystem and existing LoRa customers, LoRa NTN's effect on the general Internet of Things (IoT) market could be slightly dwarfed by cellular’s more recent NTN expansion.

The LoRa standard expanded its guidelines to include direct data links from devices to satellites in 2020 when it announced its support for new Long Range-Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (LR-FHSS) technology. The new technology increased the network’s capacity in uplink, creating a new opportunity for LoRa to communicate over satellite, while also improving the network’s performance in certain indoor and outdoor use cases.

Since the technology announcement, LoRa players have quickly assembled to usher in new LoRa NTN use cases. EchoStar Mobile, along with LoRa device maker partners like ProEsys, is a leading player responsible for bringing LoRa NTN up to speed, significantly helping the standard expand into new satellite use cases like infrastructure monitoring. In 2022, EchoStar Mobile created the first international LoRa-enabled IoT network using its Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite deployment. The company’s network extends across Europe and relies on the licensed S-band for communications. Other startup LoRa satellite operators, like Lacuna Space, are building Low Earth Orbit (LEO)-based constellations that primarily use unlicensed bands for communication, creating additional network diversity for this growing market.

These market activities are developing as the cellular NTN market gains speed. In 2022, 3GPP’s Internet of things Non-Terrestrial Network (IoT-NTN) standard was completed, enabling the cellular LPWA networks, LTE-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), to communicate over a satellite link. Given that the standard was completed 2 years after the introduction of the LR-FHSS, LoRa NTN has had the “first-mover advantage,” giving the technology a head start in developing networks and a robust device ecosystem. LoRaWAN’s technical specifications—specifically its efficient link budget and overhead—give the technology an additional advantage over IoT-NTN in power- and price-sensitive applications, which make up a significant portion of the IoT market. However, as more IoT-NTN modules are released, many market insiders are confident that the device ecosystem gap between the two technologies will close, leading many to wonder what role LoRa NTN will play in the future when IoT-NTN connections increase.

Targeted use cases for LoRa NTN typically include sensors in remote locations outside the reach of any public, private, or communal LoRaWAN coverage. According to the Alliance, this includes use cases like condition-based monitoring for remote energy infrastructure like wind turbines or remote critical infrastructure like bridges or railroads. LoRa NTN operators and other market players stress that LoRa NTN modules and devices can accommodate both terrestrial and non-terrestrial communications. Whereas most terrestrial LoRaWAN sensors are limited to private network coverage, this hybrid NTN and terrestrial option gives LoRa users more freedom to roam outside the standard’s normal bounds, which is likely one of the reasons the Alliance is depending on NTNs to develop new target markets for the LPWA standard.

IoT-NTN satellite operators list similar target applications as LoRa NTN players. Many IoT-NTN companies view agriculture, energy, and oil & gas as target verticals rife with remote use cases. The IoT-NTN market also stresses the technology’s fallback potential, as many expect IoT-NTN devices to easily switch between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks depending on terrestrial availability. Given this target market overlap, it can be challenging to discern which customers will benefit most from IoT-NTN or LoRa NTN connectivity.

The main difference between the two technologies’ applications is how realistic these roaming expectations are. Despite its ability to accommodate terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, LoRa NTN will likely not serve mobile use cases that need robust terrestrial coverage and satellite fallback. LoRaWAN’s public coverage may not be sufficient enough to support the terrestrial needs in these use cases, so LoRa NTN will mostly service standalone satellite use cases with static sensors on fixed, remote assets. On the other hand, IoT-NTN devices are more likely to include sufficient terrestrial cellular coverage and satellite coverage, so they will be better equipped to serve hybrid, mobile use cases like fleet management or maritime container tracking.

The two technologies’ applications will also differ depending on the general cost-sensitivity of a vertical. Agriculture, for example, is a legacy market that often features customers who want to digitize their assets on a budget. These price-sensitive verticals might be more likely to choose a LoRa NTN solution for their IoT deployment, particularly if they have fixed assets and low data needs.

The distinctions between the two satellite IoT technologies will continue to evolve. ABI Research expects the continued release of new IoT-NTN modules to accelerate the device ecosystem. IoT-NTN’s standardization and interoperability enable a wide number of cellular players to incorporate satellite into its product set, further expediting its adoption once modules are available. However, even if IoT-NTN connections are expected to outnumber LoRa NTN connections in the future, LoRa NTN is a significant development for one of the most popular LPWANs on the market. Indeed, many market players do not consider LoRa NTN a competitor to IoT-NTN. Many users and companies understand LoRa NTN and IoT-NTN as separate technologies suited for different applications and will consider the IoT market big enough for both of them.