Room for Devices. Capacity for Business.



The usable capacity of a system is the number of devices that can simultaneously be supported per tower or base-station with a given data usage plan. Capacity is a limited resource and the amount of capacity available is heavily dependent on the selected network technology. You can only slice a pie up so many ways before you run out, and capacity works the same way.

NETWORK GAME

Choose a technology to support the devices on your network on the left. To win the game you must add enough devices to outweigh the operating costs on the right of the scale.

You Win!

Your network can support enough devices to offset the operating costs.

Sorry!

Your network cannot support enough devices to offset the operating costs.

  • LoRa Technology
  • Sigfox Technology
  • RPMA


Usable capacity ultimately leads to the success or failure of the network (and thus its users) and is a crucial aspect from a business perspective. It’s as simple as income being greater than costs. A network’s income is the number of paying devices. Building a network requires capital expenses for deploying infrastructure (e.g. access points, basestations) on towers and rooftops, and operational expense for rental costs associated with these physical locations. If capacity is too low—i.e., not enough paying devices are supported by each tower—then the operational expenses won’t be supported by the revenue from the meager number of connected endpoints. And, trying to just charge more per device won’t work because that is what cellular has tried for years with 2G, and that obviously hasn’t helped the IoT take off.

Inadequate capacity hurts device makers, because they are automatically limiting their market size by shortening its length. The worst thing a carrier can do is to invest considerable capital expense in a network that can only lose money due to limited capacity. Everyone loses when a network technology has inadequate capacity.

To complete the analogy, uplink capacity is how much bandwidth is available—or land—times the number of floors a technology can build on a given piece of land—spectral efficiency.

RPMA has the most bandwidth available of any technology with 80 MHz available worldwide. Other existing LPWA technologies have anywhere from 1.25% to 15% of that.

So not only can they only build single story ranchers, but they have far less land to build it on. That’s hardly the vision for the IoT with tens to hundreds of billions of devices connected.

capacity
The result is that a tower with RPMA infrastructure supports a factor of 60x to 1300x more devices per piece of network infrastructure than the other existing LPWA technologies. Not surprisingly, the ability to put 60x to 1300x more devices on the network allows an RPMA carrier to charge low connectivity prices, and still make a tremendous profit.
CAPACITY-caption-09
No matter how successful the IoT is, our network will always have the ability to pack in more capacity. This means that businesses and consumers using our technology for their data pipe never have to think about the data pipe, it just works and always will. With RPMA, the success our customers and their customers is a reason for celebration. With LoRa and Sigfox technology based networks, their customers success are reasons for concern, as they are not able to scale their capacity due to lack of transmit power control. This is a fatal flaw. Ever been to a big event like a concert or sports game? Notice how difficult it is to get even an SMS message through? That is how a filledtocapacity LoRa or Sigfox technologybased network will be—but it will permanently operate at such, with no improvement possible. With RPMA, we’ve built the future success of the IoT—and your connected life—right into the core of our technology.  

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