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.
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.
Uplink Capacity. Uplink High Rises.
Uplink capacity is like real estate, albeit very valuable real estate. That explains why there are so many high-rises in Manhattan. Building up is the only way to provide more homes for people in a limited amount of land. Internet of Things (IOT) devices require spectrum to operate. And, just like real estate, spectrum is a valuable limited resource.
In the cellular industry, there is a term called spectral efficiency. That one quantity has done more to drive the evolution of cellular technology from the old-school analog phone to today’s society-altering smart phones. Spectral efficiency is a measure of how much data can be moved per Hz of bandwidth – or analogously, how many floors tall a skyscraper is. The higher the skyscraper, the more homes per piece of land. Spectral efficiency is also one of the key performance requirements that has driven the development of RPMA® (Random Phase Multiple Access). If Sigfox® or LoRa™ technology is a one–story building, then depending on the regulatory environment, RPMA ranges from a 15 to a 200 story building. That’s how you pack in the devices. As a data point, the spectral efficiency improvement of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) over GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) was only a 3x improvement (or 3 floors – a modest suburban medical building). That was more than enough for CDMA (and its sibling W-CDMA) to fully displace GSM, despite GSM’s tremendous head start in the market.
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.
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.
Downlink Capacity. Roundtrip Transactions.
With the large number of customers that RPMA has served over the last several years, we have learned that a primarily one-way system—like every other existing and developing LPWA offering is offering—has almost no commercial value. Because RPMA leverages the 2.4 GHz ISM band, we have no duty cycle requirements, like the European 868 MHz band that decimates the downlink capacity. This means RPMA-connected street lights can be controlled remotely.
It also means that point-of-sales transactions are enabled. It is what allows our partners in the Dominican Republic to activate their customers’ electricity while drastically reducing response time. True two-way communication is also what allows every single message to be acknowledged. This way none of their customers fall through the cracks. No other LPWA technology, existing or developing, does this. Lost messages are lost money. With RPMA, you keep every hard-earned penny.
Capacity Scalability. Business Scalability.
Capacity scalability refers to the ability to increase capacity by adding more network infrastructure once connected endpoints have exhausted currently existing capacity. This capability means that as businesses thrive on the IoT, connecting and making their organizations smart and automated, they can add all the devices they need with no worries about their network filling up a few years down the road. Due to transmit power control and other innovations, RPMA is able to scale easily and for all intents and purposes, infinitely, as devices fill the network, whether by adding more channels, more sectors, or deploying additional towers to “absorb” capacity.
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 filled–to–capacity LoRa or Sigfox technology–based 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.