| | NOVEMBER 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONENTERPRISE NETWORKS TURN TO CELLULAR LPWA TO POWER THEIR IOT-ENABLED FUTURESBy Alexander Bufalino, Quectel Wireless Solutions - VP Global Marketing at QuectelWith IoT connections now numbering in the billions, furtherhyperscale growth is well underway as enterprises embrace IoT as the enabler of digital business. The connectivity options available have widened to address the different demands of enterprise IoT use cases ranging from low bandwidth offerings up to 5G cellular which is not ubiquitously available yet. Enterprise IoT deployments today are finding that low power wide area (LPWA) cellular connectivity meets their requirements for coverage and capacity at an attractive cost and with the support of a large developer ecosystem, writes Alexander Bufalino, VP of Marketing at Quectel Wireless Solutions. It's easy to get carried away and imagine that every connected device needs the low latency, capacity and coverage density that 5G offers but this is not the reality. 5G will be a wonderful addition to the connectivity options for enterprise IoT but public networks are not readily available, economies of scale have not brought the cost of 5G devices down and few enterprise IoT use cases need the capabilities of 5G today. As the first company to bring a 5G IoT module to market, Quectel is seeing 5G uptake for utilization in private networks which are revolutionizing manufacturing, campus networks and smart cities.These innovative deployments demonstrate the fantastic power of 5G connectivity but they do not represent the hyperscale mass market for IoT. This is because most IoT applications need lower capacity, are less sensitive to latency and need to operate at lower cost than 5G can deliver today. In addition, many IoT devices only need to communicate relatively small amounts of data at infrequent intervals. Continuous high bandwidth communication is not a requirement for many enterprise IoT
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