Those Sneaky Variable Costs

In the prior few posts, we’ve discussed how longevity enables the economies of scale needed for the next wave of IoT devices. Longevity also enables a reduction in variable costs. As our simple example tells it, the lack of variable costs each time a device needs to be serviced is what makes an IoT investment possible. Many of our earliest customers were highly demanding utility customers, and they helped us hone our technology by giving us real-world problems to solve. These problems challenged us to meet needs that weren’t the kind a committee could foresee in their discussion rooms. These customers wanted to eliminate a cost that already existed in their world: the need to send a technician out to find out what is actually happening at a meter. These truck rolls were time consuming and very costly. And more, often the truck rolls were unnecessary and could have been entirely with a little more data on what was happening at the meter.
For the new wave of IoT applications, it is essential that the wireless tech not only eliminate truck rolls, but it must not introduce truck rolls because of inadequate battery life or built in obsolescence (like the technology sunsets that plague the cellular world).

That is why the longevity that long battery life allows is such a core part of LPWA’s value as the connectivity solution for the IoT.

Moving Beyond the Low Hanging Fruit

To unlock the tens of billions of devices expected to join the IoT, we cannot be limited to only the lowest hanging fruit. As shown by our simple example, longevity is the key to achieving the economies of scale that enable investing in the IoT broadly and deeply throughout the market. When truck rolls are never even a problem, application designers can build an entirely new class of IoT devices. Without longevity, only very high-return applications are worth investing in but with it, a vast field of savings opportunities open up. Only with RPMA’s longevity can we unlock the next great wave of the IoT.

See for yourself why RPMA is the only viable LPWA public network connectivity solution by reading our white paper, How RPMA Works.