Amazon Sidewalk and Helium LongFi put pressure on operators’ consumer and business IoT propositions

Helium announced Helium LongFi shortly after raising USD15 million series C funding in June 2019 and Amazon announced Amazon Sidewalk at its Alexa event in September 2019 – two potentially disruptive IoT networks. Both technologies are designed to support connectivity requirements beyond the range of Wi-Fi and can be characterised as serving a 'neighbourhood'. They will support largely static or low-mobility assets and will provide location data. When enough gateways are deployed, they will form a city-wide mesh network that could compete directly with LPWA networks such as NB-IoT, at least for some applications.