What is LPWAN and why does it matter for IoT?
LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) is a family of radio technologies built to send small amounts of data over long distances while using very little power — which is what makes battery-powered sensors viable for years in the field. Sigfox/0G, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are the main LPWAN families, and after years of proven deployments none of them is a "wrong choice" in general — the right one depends on your use case.
0G (Sigfox), LoRaWAN, NB-IoT: what's actually different for my project?
Sigfox/0G uses Ultra Narrow Band transmission — like a whistle cutting through noise: all the power is concentrated into a tiny bandwidth, giving long range with very simple, "plug & play" devices, at the cost of a limited daily message budget. LoRa uses spread-spectrum transmission instead — like a net rather than a beam — repeating the message across frequencies for resilience, with higher theoretical throughput but more configuration work on the device side.
What is the 0G network and when does it make sense for a mobile or dispersed fleet?
The 0G network is the Sigfox-technology global network: a single, unified backend regardless of country, with devices that require no configuration once deployed. That "plug & play" nature and wide network footprint make it well suited to objects that move or are spread across many uncontrolled sites — exactly the case where deploying and maintaining your own infrastructure per site isn’t realistic.
Should I deploy my own private LPWAN network, or use a public network operator?
On real numbers, a private network costs roughly €17,000–€30,000 over five years once you include gateways, installation, backhaul connectivity, management software and IT oversight — plus around 40 person-days of coordination over that period. A public operator subscription runs closer to €400–500 per year per device. As a rule of thumb, if you're not confident you'll operate more than around 500 devices on a site, a public network is very likely the more cost-effective and reliable choice; private networks make more sense for lab or test environments needing full autonomy.
Can I trust a simple side-by-side chart comparing LPWAN technologies?
Be careful — many public LPWAN comparisons mix up things that aren’t comparable: signal strength (RSSI) depends on the antenna and transmit power used in the test, not on the technology itself, and a poorly documented range test (e.g. a technology "failing" at 9km when it is well known to reach 10–50km) usually reflects the experimental setup, not a hard technology limit. A trustworthy comparison documents its exact test conditions and avoids declaring one universal "winner", because the right technology genuinely depends on the use case.
Is the LPWAN market already saturated, or is there still room for new projects?
After years of proven deployments, Sigfox/0G, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT and LTE-M have each demonstrated they work — the debate isn’t really "which one wins" anymore. Each technology tends to serve a distinct segment (private LoRaWAN for localized, high-density sites; Sigfox/0G for dispersed, mobile, global-scale fleets), and there is enough demand across those segments for new projects to find their place rather than compete head-on for the same use case.