LoRaWAN or NB-IoT for building sensors

A building-sensor project in the UAE runs into the LoRaWAN-versus-NB-IoT question earlier than most guides admit, because the two technologies solve the same low-power, long-range problem with almost opposite plumbing. One rides spectrum that nobody owns. The other rides an operator's own licensed band. That single difference decides most of what follows: how far a signal reaches, how a battery is spent, and who sends the monthly bill.

LoRaWAN is a specification kept by the LoRa Alliance, built on the LoRa radio developed by Semtech. NB-IoT is a 3GPP standard, frozen in Release 13 in June 2016 and extended since in Releases 14 and 15. In the UAE the practical difference lands on two separate desks. LoRaWAN devices fall under the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority's rules for short-range devices, most recently the Ultra-Wide Band and Short Range Devices Regulations, Version 5.0, dated 30 October 2023. NB-IoT devices need a SIM and a data plan from e& or du, because the device talks over the operator's spectrum, not the public's.

Spectrum: unlicensed against licensed

TDRA classes the sub-1GHz bands LoRaWAN uses as short range devices operating under Class Authorisation, on what the regulation itself calls a non-interference and non-protection basis: no exclusive right to the channel, and no protection from anyone else using it. The technical schedule sets a separate power and duty-cycle limit for each frequency slice, summarised below.

That is not a coincidence. The LoRa Alliance's own regional parameters table lists the United Arab Emirates against exactly this split: EU863-870 for the 863 to 870 and 870 to 875.8 MHz bands, and AS923-3 for 915 to 921 MHz. A LoRaWAN device built to either plan is, in effect, built to TDRA's own schedule already.

NB-IoT needs none of this. It runs inside e&'s or du's own LTE spectrum: deployed in-band inside an existing carrier, in that carrier's unused guard-band blocks, or on a dedicated standalone carrier, the three modes 3GPP defines. The operator already holds the licence, so there is no separate frequency filing to make.

Range and building penetration

Semtech, which makes the LoRa radio chips under LoRaWAN, quotes a link of up to three miles (five kilometres) in urban areas and up to ten miles (fifteen kilometres) or more in rural, line-of-sight conditions, from a single gateway. Those figures assume an outdoor site. The trade-off indoors is spreading factor, not distance: a lower spreading factor moves data faster but tolerates less signal loss; a higher one crawls, but survives a deeper basement.

NB-IoT reaches equally poor locations by a different route: repetition, not distance. 3GPP Release 13 defines three coverage-enhancement classes, EC0, EC1 and EC2, adding 0 dB, 10 dB and 20 dB of extra link margin by resending the same signalling and data several times over the air. Du described its 2019 move to Release 14 as adding a further 10 dB of coverage extension over that baseline, better, it said, than LTE achieves on band 20 at 800 MHz. The trade-off, per the GSMA's own deployment guide for operators, is that repetition costs power: battery life shrinks at the deeper coverage classes.

For a plant room three floors underground, the two technologies solve the same problem from opposite ends. LoRaWAN answers it by moving the antenna: one well-sited gateway usually clears a whole building. NB-IoT falls back instead to a slower, more repeated, more battery-hungry mode of whatever macro-cell signal already reaches that basement, or does not.

Data rate

LoRaWAN's data rate is set by spreading factor and bandwidth, and the LoRa Alliance publishes it as a table rather than a single figure. At the slowest LoRa setting, SF12 on 125 kHz, a EU863-870 or AS923-3 device manages roughly 250 bit/s. At the fastest LoRa setting, SF7 on 250 kHz, it reaches roughly 11,000 bit/s. An optional FSK mode on the same hardware reaches 50,000 bit/s.

NB-IoT is harder to state as a bit rate, because 3GPP's specification talks in transport block size, not throughput. A Release 13 device is limited to 680 bits downlink and 1,000 bits uplink per transmission; Release 14 raised that, for the newer Category NB2 devices, to 2,536 bits on both links. Neither standards body publishes a bits-per-second figure for NB-IoT in the documents checked here, so the fair comparison is between a LoRaWAN packet of up to 250 bytes at its fastest setting and an NB-IoT transport block that, even after the Release 14 increase, carries well under half that in one go.

Battery life

Both technologies are built around the same rough target: ten years from a single primary cell, for a device reporting infrequently. Semtech states LoRaWAN battery life as up to 10 years. NB-IoT reaches for the same figure through Power Saving Mode, which the GSMA's deployment guide frames as a way to reach a ten-year battery life by keeping a device registered with the network while asleep, skipping the reattach procedure a powered-off radio would otherwise need on waking.

The sleep itself has hard limits. A device may ask to sleep for roughly 413 days at a stretch under Release 13's T3412 timer, and must be reachable for no more than 186 minutes once awake, under the companion timer T3324. A network can grant less than either figure, never more. Etisalat, now e&, quoted the same decade-long figure commercially when it announced the UAE launch.

Neither ten-year figure survives contact with poor coverage unchanged. Push an NB-IoT device into EC2 because the nearest cell is weak, or push a LoRaWAN device to its highest spreading factor because the gateway sits three walls away, and both burn through the same battery faster than the headline number promises.

Coverage across the UAE

NB-IoT coverage in the UAE is inherited, not built. Etisalat, now e&, switched NB-IoT and LTE-M on commercially on 10 July 2017, the first operator in the MENA region to do so, running both over its existing LTE network rather than any new radio estate. Du followed on 19 February 2019 with a next-generation NB-IoT deployment on 3GPP Release 14, built with Nokia, Affirmed Networks and MediaTek. Because both networks ride the operator's own towers, coverage is simply wherever that operator's LTE already reaches, with no separate NB-IoT map to check.

LoRaWAN has no equivalent utility behind it. Neither e& nor du runs a public LoRaWAN network as a service the way each runs NB-IoT. The closest the UAE has is a hosted core network: LORIOT switched on its sixth Professional Public Server worldwide in Dubai on 2 November 2022, the first such deployment in the Arab world, per the LoRa Alliance. That server handles the network and application layer for a subscribing project; it says nothing about gateway coverage on the ground, which a building project still has to provide itself, typically one gateway per site given the ranges above.

Cost model

The spectrum split from the first section carries straight through to cost. LoRaWAN's Class Authorisation still attracts a fee, set out in TDRA's Spectrum Fees Regulation rather than the short-range-device rules themselves, and a project also has to buy or provision a gateway: a one-off capital cost if the network runs privately. Running it instead through a public server such as LORIOT's swaps that capital cost for a recurring, per-device network fee, with no gateway of one's own needed at every site.

NB-IoT swaps the order around. No spectrum filing. No gateway. Just a SIM and a data plan from e& or du for every device, for as long as it reports. Neither operator publishes a per-device NB-IoT tariff on its enterprise pages, so the real comparison comes from a quote, not a rate card. The structure underneath stays fixed: LoRaWAN trades an upfront cost for independence from a carrier; NB-IoT trades that independence for a bill that scales with the number of devices reporting.

Where each one earns its place

If you are speccing a single building, or a tight campus with someone able to check a gateway occasionally, LoRaWAN tends to win: one gateway usually covers the property, running cost sits close to zero once installed, and nothing depends on a carrier's own plans. A portfolio scattered across a city, with no maintenance visits budgeted and coverage that must work from day one, tends to favour NB-IoT: it rides infrastructure e& and du have already built, at the cost of a SIM fee per device and a battery budget that shrinks wherever the network has to repeat itself to reach it.

TDRA's short-range-device schedule was last reissued on 30 October 2023, as Version 5.0. A LoRaWAN device specified against an earlier print of that table is specified against one TDRA has already replaced.