“Operators in the Middle East should increase businesses’ awareness of LPWA services, develop simple solutions and nurture the developer ecosystem to support the adoption of such services.”
IoT services providers in the Middle East have announced at least 16 low-power, wide-area (LPWA) networks since 2016. However, we believe that only three start-ups (and no established operators) offer commercial LPWA network services as of December 2018. This is in stark contrast to other regions such as Western Europe, in which 17 established telecoms operators run two thirds of the region’s 35 commercial LPWA networks.
The delay in commercialising LPWA services in the Middle East may not affect operators’ ability to address the demand for IoT services in the long term, but it highlights the relatively low priority of IoT in the region. If operators are serious about commercialising LPWA solutions, they will need to think about how to accelerate their launch.
This comment presents a review of LPWA deployments in the Middle East and discusses what operators can learn from more-advanced markets in order to address opportunities.
The availability of LPWA services remains limited in the Middle East
Analysys Mason’s LPWA tracker shows that 5 of the 16 LPWA networks that have been announced in the Middle East since 2016 are at a pre-commercial stage (all of which belong to established telecoms operators). That is, the network is built but commercial services have not yet been launched. Only 3 of the 16 are believed to be commercially available to end users (all of which are owned by start-ups) (Figure 1).
LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are the most-frequently adopted technologies by local providers. Only EITC (du) and Etisalat have adopted more than one technology. Outside the Middle East, the leading operators (including AT&T, Telefónica, Verizon and Vodafone) have adopted multiple LPWA standards. This approach enables operators to meet the requirements of different use cases and to reduce the risks of selecting the wrong technology.