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by steve_gh 969 days ago
Another competitor to LORA (and the LORAWAN stack) is NB-IoT - a 4G variant.

They all occupy roughly the same space - high penetration, low bandwidth, low power telemetry for IoT systems.

The differences (from a development or product perspective) are in licenced (NB-IoT) vs unlicenced (LORA) spectrum, and in the infrastructure. With NB-IoT the infrastructure is owned by a telco, and you buy a SIM card. There are LORA operators, but you can also add your own base station if you need to.

If your product is primarily aimed at areas with NB-IoT coverage, it is the easiest way to go. But if you need to deploy IoT in areas without NB-IoT coverage, LORA is preferable (albeit at the cots of potentially having to manage your own base stations).

Sadly, there is no chipset that I am aware of that does both LORA and NB-IoT