All LPWA technologies offer long battery life, coverage benefits, and lower costs. However with LTE-M being an evolution of LTE, it offers many advantages over the unlicensed competitors.
They include:
- Carrier-grade security: LTE-M has the advantage of proven SIM security and is managed to avoid interference from other wireless networks and devices
- Scalability: LTE-M has nationwide coverage at launch, unlicensed vendors have to deploy market by market, building new network infrastructure. It will take years to get equivalent coverage, if they ever do.
- Mobility: LTE-M tower handoff enables continuous connection to devices that may be in motion over several miles
- Voice: None of the unlicensed technologies can support any voice service. LTE-M has roadmap to support VoLTE for alarm panels or similar uses