Amazon Sidewalk and Helium’s LoRa partnerships could stimulate the sluggish consumer IoT market

Amazon Sidewalk and Helium announced partnerships with Semtech, a founding member of the LoRa Alliance in September 2020 and March 2020, respectively. Both projects will use LoRa technology in their networks. LoRa is a relatively established technology with an extensive supplier ecosystem. These partnerships, combined with Sidewalk and Helium’s innovative business models and, for Sidewalk, the backing of Amazon, present a potential threat to operators. This threat may be greatest in the consumer IoT market, where take-up is relatively weak (at least for devices that need wide-area coverage).

This article assesses the threat that the Amazon Sidewalk and Helium partnerships poses to operators in the consumer IoT market and what operators can do to counter that threat.