After the two successful 2016 ad 2017 editions, the LPWAN Conference event will take place this year in June in a brand new format. L’Embarqué is now the only organizing entity of the one-day LPWAN18 Conference. Two or three high level keynotes in the morning will be followed by two tracks in the afternoon, ...one dedicated to network infrastructure evolutions and protocols standardization, and the other one more focused on application perspectivs of LPWAN networks (smart city, metering, geolocation...). The whole day an exhibition with small booths will give in parallel the opportunities to meet the main actors of the domain (technology providers, board manufacturers, network operators, design firms…).

Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) are an ideal solution for machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications which demands wide coverage and a sparing use of energy at a limited cost. Smart City (with embedded sensors in urban settings), water, gas & electricity metering, e-health, connected buildings, agriculture… are amongst the many applications that can be addressed by LPWANs with a very bright future ahead. Analysts anticipate an explosion of the number of LPWAN connections in the next 8 years. According to Machina Research, more than 3 billion LPWA-enabled M2M connections will be deployed between now and 2023, exceeding the number of M2M cellular (2G, 3G, 4G…) connections. For IHS Markit the number of all LPWAN connections (NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, LTE-M, Sigfox…) will exceed one billion by 2021, for a CAGR of 206%! And 450 million of them will be based on NB-IoT, a 3GPP standard promoted by mobile operators and actively supported by China…