LPWAN stands for Low Power Wide Area Networks. These technologies are the heart of the innovative IoT technologies. They are allowing sensors / devices to work and communicate for years with really small power requirements. They are enabling long range communication, allowing low costs networks. The first coming on the market was Sigfox with a commercial offer in 2013. After that, a first country-wide LoRaWan public network was deployed in 2016. 3GPP technologies, LTE-M and NB-IoT are completing the panel of solutions with large deployments starting in years 2017-2018.

All along the technology emergence journey, the most frequent question was to find the one going to eat the others. Regarding the market size and the involved money, the communication strategy for the telecoms industry was to consider it and make it a red ocean. The consequences on adoption were not without delaying the customer projects and the IoT market growth.

Blue Ocean strategy is coming from a book written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Basically it’s about the way you build your business. In red ocean (fishes are fighting each others and blood makes the color) you design your product for targeting the exact same use-cases and clients than competition. You have a frontal competition. In a blue ocean (peaceful) you design your product’s strength based on competition weakness. You create a complementary product on the market. You make different customers satisfied.

Six years from now the first networks was opened. Now that all the technological solutions are proven, I can clearly confirm a blue ocean for all these LPWAN technologies. Actors should switch to blue ocean strategy to accelerate #IoT business and accelerate profit acquisition.