At a time when all private telecom operators like Vodafone Idea, Reliance Jio and Airtel are preparing to give a push to their Internet of Things business through narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology, players like Tata Communications and SenRa are also making efforts to build a parallel network, called Low Power Wide Area Network based on LoRaWAN technology, to drive India’s IoT ecosystem, mainly targeting Modi government’s projects like Smart City Mission and Swatch Bharat.Tata Communications has already deployed its LoRaWAN network in 45 cities of India and is now covering over 215 million people. The company has plans of expanding presence to 70-80 cities by the end of this year, a person familiar with the development told ET. It has reportedly committed over $100 million in investments in the IoT space.SenRa, a LoRaWAN network operator, has also deployed its network in 42 cities, and now plans to extend the coverage to 60 cities by the end of this year.“Since we were not mobile operators, the only way for us to get into IoT space was to deploy unlicensed band technology and this is what we did. After some six months of testing, we decided to go with LoRaWAN,” Eric Torres, VP, Tata Communications Transformation Services Limited, told ET.Torres said that Tata Communications had also tested Sigfox technology but decided to go ahead with LoRaWAN.SigFox is another IoT technology that operates on unlicensed 856 Mhz band same as LoRaWAN. LoRaWAN is a global standard supported by the LoRa Alliance with more than 500+ active company members and 100+ public operators globally whereas Sigfox hasn’t matured to become a global standard.“We just finished 42 cities. Some of them are building out rapidly basis project driven requirement. Some cities have more coverage than others. We have proactively deployed some infrastructure in smart city areas within these cities for people to test use cases, proof of concepts (PoCs) and demonstrations,” Ali Hosseini, Chief Executive Officer of SenRa, told ET.Hosseini, who is also the Co-Chair of the LoRa Alliance Marketing Committee, said that project-based deployments may push the company to be present in all 100 smart cities by 2020-end.Analysts said that awareness about the LoRaWAN technology has already spread and it is now being considered aggressively for various projects with Smart City mission and even in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) space. They believe that LPWAN technology would be able to satisfy about 70% of smart city requirements in India.“We are now past the education period, and we are seeing these PoCs being converted to commercial projects,” Hosseini said, adding that LoRaWAN will be deployed commercially at a big scale in India in 2019-2020.Satyajit Sinha, Research Analyst with Counterpoint Research said, “In India, currently, Sigfox and LoRaWAN are pushing LPWA-IoT application as LTE-M and NB-IoT have not yet been commercially deployed in India.”NB-IoT technology works in a licensed spectrum band, and it requires 4G technology. LoRaWAN, on the other hand, offers flexibility in this regard. Analysts said NB-IoT being licensed would require a monthly recurring fee, LoRaWAN being unlicensed can be deployed privately without a recurring fee only requiring capex or can be subscribed as a service from a public operator at the fraction of the cost.LoRaWAN modules cost $3 less than NB-IoT, according to Counterpoint Research.LoRaWAN and GSM penetrate differently in buildings and LoRaWAN penetrates much deeper. NB-IoT will have a play in areas where more throughput is required and life-cycle for a device is less.All three operators, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, and Bharti Airtel , are planning to launch NB-IoT by the end of 2019 to push their respective enterprise businesses, especially around Internet of Things (IoT).Vodafone Idea is the only telco that has launched commercial proofs of concept for NB-IoT-based services in Kochi, Jaipur, Bengaluru and Chennai for various use cases, including smart energy metering.VIL’s chief enterprise business officer Nick Gliddon recently told ET that the will take its NB-IoT across India in the next 12 months. “VIL is focusing on NB-IoT because it was a global GSMA standard, which would help bring the device costs down as the ecosystem grows in scale,” Gliddon said.Rival Reliance Jio Infocomm last year launched an NB-IoT network with a commercial network available in Mumbai in partnership with its 4G gear partner, Samsung. Jio is preparing to foray into enterprise services and may expand its IoT services accordingly.Jio recently claimed that it is the only telco in India to have the capability and network footprint for a nationwide launch of NB-IoT services. Jio president Mathew Oommen had told ET that the telco has a unique advantage again being only (4G) LTE and all-IP network. "We have the capability compared to any other operator to launch nationwide NB-IoT in India without having any incremental spectrum leveraging guard bands."Bharti Airtel, too, is conducting NB-IoT pilots and is planning to launch commercial services soon.Airtel’s global chief information officer, Harmeen Mehta had previously told ET that the telco had looked at LoRaWAN technology but decided to opt for NB-IoT because the ecosystem was fast converging around the latter technology. “The combination of NB-IoT and LTE-M will be the prevalent story in India…we have been doing a lot of proof of concepts, and are now getting ready for NB-IoT.”The NB-IoT market in India is currently non-existent due to the unavailability of any commercial deployment. SenRa’s Hosseini said that the commercial deployment based on LoRaWAN has already reached in over 10,000 devices, which will increase to a few lakhs in next 6-12 months.Counterpoint’s Sinha believes that the Indian market will have the co-existence of both the technologies due to different kinds of use cases. “There is no LoRaWAN vs NBIoT war. Over the short to medium term, we expect co-existence and even the combined use of both licensed and unlicensed LPWA technologies.”Cost and the ease of deployment using an unlicensed band are the key benefits for adopting LoRaWAN technology in India.Hosseini said that both technologies can be complementary to each other. “The infrastructure to deploy new towers and base stations for IoT doesn't make sense for a telco. LoRaWAN can be deployed with cheap infrastructure to fill in dead spots in the city to have seamless connectivity”“We have had discussions with some telcos to provide complimentary service offering,” he added.Analysts said that the Indian government’s vision to have 5 billion connected devices by 2022 in the country can’t be achieved without the smart city large scale projects.Smart metering space is emerging as the biggest IoT segment for both LoRaWAN and NB-IoT technologies with market reaching in millions of devices. Gas, water and electric meters are leading the way in IoT.“Tenders are floating on smart meters - that's going to really drive numbers. It will drive first big scale deployment. These are approved tenders,” Hosseini said.Within the smart city mission, need for street light and smart parking is also emerging, which will lead to sensor-based IoT deployment. Analysts said that in Maharashtra alone, there are 5000 projects on LoRaWAN.Industrial IoT is also emerging as one of the leading IoT segments with deployments underway in manufacturing and logistics areas. Analysts said that the hospitality sector is also starting showing interest in IoT.Analysts believe that NB-IoT in India specifically lacks in ecosystem for devices. In order to address the challenge, telcos are taking partner-led approach to build a complete ecosystem around their NB-IoT networks.VIL currently has 25 partners and the number is expected to double soon, as it seeks to build use cases around the new technology. These partners are mainly startups and small and medium enterprises that will bring in hardware and software capabilities to enable new NB-IoT use cases.Airtel too is looking for partners to drive the ecosystem. Mehta had said that the device ecosystem needed to evolve in the country for IoT to reach the mass market.Device ecosystem challenge isn’t limited to NB-IoT, LoRaWAN technology is also facing a similar challenge not just in India, but globally.Hosseini said if the Indian government decides to expand the unlicensed spectrum to 868 Mhz from865-867 Mhz, and free up some space in 900 MHz then it will allow Europe and the US LoRaWAN products to fully work in India without any device modification.