hefty pipes
The Internet of Things (IoT) is surprisingly a lot like a shower: both involve pipes. Showers use water pipes, and the IoT uses data pipes.

But in the IoT space, not every connectivity provider offers the same size pipe. For example, RPMA’s pipe is 40,000+ bps (FCC), cellular’s sunsetting 2G is greater but going away, while the closest LPWA providers are somewhere between 500 and 2000 bps (FCC). Yikes! Imagine if the water pipe to your shower had that kind of water throughput! Coffee straw throughput just doesn’t work for most applications.

And while M2M devices don’t need much data, a pipe the size of a coffee straw will still drastically limit the number of devices you can serve. The water coming out of the pipe can either serve fewer devices with more data per device, or more devices with less data. But if there is much less water to go around in the first place, you simply can’t serve the same number of devices as a service with a larger pipe. That leaves our small straw friends incapable of fulfilling the grand vision of the tens of billions of connected devices.
While M2M devices don’t need much data, a pipe the size of a coffee straw will still drastically limit the number of devices you can serve
Now let’s adjust our thinking and look at the end of those pipes and imagine them as pies. Those pies are sliced and divided up in a few ways: actual messages, overhead, and essential features. Naturally some small slice of each pie goes to overhead, and that’s the case with every provider. The majority of that slice goes to the contents of the actual message itself. And some of it should go to providing essential capabilities like true security, message acknowledgement, firmware updates, and other features.

However, some LPWA providers pipes are so small, their throughput is so constricted, that they cannot even offer true two-way communication. If they can offer two-way communication, the pipe back to the device is so small that firmware upgrades are impossible and security is still simple: hackable encryption without the other essential protections. RPMA, with capacity that dwarfs LPWA providers, provides the full-featured connectivity you’d expect from cellular, but with super low-battery consumption and extreme network longevity. Powered by RPMA, the Machine Network offers unprecedented IoT network capabilities. RPMA’s capacity enables full-featured connectivity and superior solution longevity with no network sunsets and long battery life.

Learn more about how RPMA is able to meet the needs of most IoT devices by reading our white paper, How RPMA Works.