IoT Radio Technologies comparison

To help you choose the best radio technology for your IoT solution, we have compared all the possibilities available on the market. Read our overview.

23th February 2018

Maciej Rygielski

Selection of radio technology for IoT solution is a tough decision and must be taken up wisely. It all comes down to four basic factors:

1. Cost of module

2. Cost of transmission

3. Data type

4. Energy consumption

IoT Engineers usually pick one of the popular radio technologies or propose hybrid solutions, which are most cost efficient.

Would you like to test your idea?

Radio technologies review

	Bluetooth Low Energy	LTE	LoRa	Sigfox
Business summary	Small range solution which allows to transmit audio-video signal. No cost for communication	Long range solution, with high data band. High connectivity cost and high module cost	Big range solution with low module cost, no transmission cost and data rate fitting majority of IoT solutions	Low-cost solution for obtaining simple data from units in wider area (like gps location, temperature, etc.) For sending small, infrequent chunks of data in one direction
Sample Use Cases	Monitoring of machines in a small part of facility (complex sensor data, even audio-video)	Real life remote audio-video streaming. Sending multiple sensor data with high frequency.	Monitoring of machines – multiple sensor data in large facilities or in wide rural area (power consumption, temperature, etc.)	Single Sensor monitoring single in very wide areas, Monitoring temperature in numerous locations
Technical
Range	50-150m Better range if Bluetooth 5 is used	35km max for GSM	2-5km (urban environment), 15km (suburban environment)	30-50km (rural environments), 3-10km (urban environments)
Data rate – content	Voice, pictures, low quality video, text data	Voice, pictures, high quality video, text data	Short text data	Short text data
Data rate – values	1Mbps (Smart/BLE) Better data rate if Bluetooth 5 is used	35-170kps (GPRS), 120-384kbps (EDGE), 384Kbps-2Mbps (UMTS), 600kbps-10Mbps (HSPA), 3-10Mbps (LTE) – video streaming in high quality	0.3-50 kbps.	140 message per hour, 1message=12Bytes
Costs¹
Cost of connectivity¹	Free	3-5$/unit/month – strongly depends on the country	Private – Free Public (LoRaWAN)- small number of operators – pricing offer often do not exist yet	<1$???/month for multiple units
Cost of infrastruture¹	No cost	No cost	LoRa P2P has no infrastructure cost For LoraWAN operators single gateway cost is 230-1200 EUR	No cost
Cost of module	5-30$	30-50$	9-12$	5-10$
Power consumption [mW]	10–500	5000	100	50
Security
Data Security	Secure	Secure	Secure – Messages are visible for everyone, but content may be secured(encrypted)	Secure
Jamming Security – cost of jamming	500$ to jam 15m radius	650$ to jam a single gateway	30EUR⁷	No data
Connectivity in motion (for example in cars)	Possible	Possible	Possible	Moderate efficiency⁸
Other
Geographical constraints	Global availability, licence free radio frequency ranges	GSM network is has high coverage in majority of the countries, GSM frequencies are licensed	USA, EU and China have different frequency usage for LoRa. In India LoRa is partially in licensed frequencies	Limited Coverage around the globe. See this link⁴

Hybrid solutions are most cost efficient

Most common IoT scenarois – multiple sensor data collected by multiple units spread around one facility or small area can be easily optimised in terms of cost by making hybrid solutions

1. LTE Gateway + LoRa

2 . LTE Gateway + Bluetooth

3. Land line/WiFi + LoRa

4. Land line/WiFi + Bluetooth