Satellite integration is set to grow
Terrestrial LoRaWAN networks cannot achieve complete geographic coverage. Yegin cited Swisscom’s nationwide Switzerland deployment, which covers 97.2% of the population but cannot reach remote alpine terrain.
Two LoRa Alliance members, Lacuna Space and Plan-S, already operate commercial LoRaWAN services from low Earth orbit. Standard LoRaWAN end devices communicate with those satellites without modification. Target use cases include remote terrain monitoring, linear infrastructure such as oil pipelines and rail lines, open ocean tracking, and border security.
European regulators approved satellite-to-low-power device communications in 2025. Additional non-terrestrial network announcements from Alliance members are expected to be revealed at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2026 event in March.
Adoption challenges and what’s next
Despite 10 years of development and 125 million deployed devices, Yegin said awareness remains the primary adoption barrier. He also pointed to a structural challenge that has constrained IoT broadly. A deployable solution requires every link in the chain to work: sensor, network, application, support and resellers. One weak link renders the solution unusable.
“The moment people understand what their own problems are and then understand what LoRaWAN can offer, that’s when things start accelerating pretty fast,” he said.
On near-term priorities, smart home is the least developed vertical in the alliance’s current portfolio, with announcements in the pipeline. Satellite scale-up is the other focus. Yegin noted that these markets are technically interrelated. When a smart home deploys LoRaWAN, it immediately serves the utility market because meters in that household connect to the same network. Smart city networks in turn complement smart home networks for asset tracking use cases.
