what is LPWAN ?

A lot of buzz nowadays around Lora, sigfox, NB-IOT and other LPWAN based technologies. this short post is about a basic introduction on the LPWAN technologies 

LPWAN means low power wide area network LPWAN technology is perfectly suited for connecting devices that need to send small amounts of data over a long range, while maintaining long battery life.

Lets see the following range vs power usage graph to see where LPWAN stands with othe communication technologies like Bluetooth , wifi , zigbee and others 

So LPWAN has the following characteristics:

• Low power (between 5 to 10 years)
• Range in kilometers (up to 10Km)
• Low bit-rate: Less than 5,000 bits per second. Often only 20-256 bytes per message are            sent several times a day.
• Clever modulation
• Cheap

LPWAN technologies can be sub divided into the following categories:

1. UNB
2. (NB-iot, NB-Ciot, LTE-iot)
3.  Lora

UNB	Cellular NB (narrowband)	Lora
Sigfox	NB-iot	Lora Alliance
Telensa	NB-Ciot	LinkLabs
Nwave	LTE-iot
eightless
Hardware Manufacturers
Texas instruments (Sigfox)	Qualcomm	Semtech
Atmel (Sigfox)	Intel	ST electronics (semtech licence )
Samsung (Sigfox)		Microchip (semtech licence )
Silicon labs (Sigfox)