Cable MSOs Are Opening Fast Track To Big Role in Smart City Initiatives
Demand for Low Power IoT WANs Fuels Opportunities Unrelated to Cellular Connectivity
October 28, 2019 – U.S. cable operators are taking a credible shot at being the go-to suppliers of the hybrid Low Power Wide Area Network grids that will support a vast range of smart city, building, farm and other industrial-strength IoT applications now in play nationwide.
With a growing base of relationships involving municipalities, public interest groups and vendor partners, the cable MSOs are taking on telcos in the LPWAN IoT arena by utilizing Long Range (LoRa) wireless propagation over narrow slices of unlicensed spectrum to support the low-bandwidth applications that are destined to blanket urban and rural landscapes in the years ahead. At first glance this might seem to be a hopeless quest, given that mobile carriers can cover all the smart industrial bases by combining their high-bandwidth, mobile networking presence with newly deployed LPWAN networks that leverage unused guard bands in their licensed spectrum via the GSM standard known as Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT).
