Cellular, LoRaWAN, or Wi-Fi: choosing the right network for field devices

By the time a client asks us about connectivity, they’ve usually already picked a sensor and a dashboard, and the network is the last decision left — which is backwards. Connectivity choice constrains battery life, coverage, and running cost for the life of the deployment, so it’s worth getting right before hardware is finalised.

The three options, and what they’re actually for

Cellular is the default for anything moving — vehicle tracking, mobile cold-chain units, anywhere the device leaves a fixed site. It needs no infrastructure of your own, but carries an ongoing SIM cost per device and draws meaningfully more power than the alternatives.

LoRaWAN is built for the opposite case: fixed sensors, low data volume, long battery life. A single gateway can cover a warehouse campus or several kilometres of open ground, and a well-designed node can run for years on one battery. The trade-off is bandwidth — this is for a reading every few minutes, not a video feed.

Wi-Fi wins when the device already sits inside a building with power and an existing network: point-of-sale hardware, office access control, indoor environmental sensors. Cheapest to run, but tied to the building it’s installed in.

The question we actually start with

Not “which network is best” but: does this device move, and how often does it need to report? A fixed asset reporting hourly wants LoRaWAN. A vehicle needs cellular. A till in a shop that’s already wired for power and internet just needs Wi-Fi. Most projects end up mixing two of the three — a LoRaWAN sensor network feeding into a cellular gateway, for example — and that’s fine. The mistake is committing to one network for every device before asking what each device is actually reporting, and how often.