For much of its history, LoRaWAN was a utility technology. Its biggest deployments were water and gas meters, read once or twice a day from pits and basements, with batteries expected to last a decade or more. That base still matters. But the latest milestone for the standard shows how far its use has spread.
In September 2026, the LoRa Alliance, the industry body behind the open LoRaWAN specification, said deployments had reached 150 million connected devices worldwide. The examples behind that figure include smart padlocks, tracked pallets, bicycles, panic buttons and employee safety badges alongside meters and industrial sensors.
The number is a useful marker. More interesting is what it reveals about how LoRaWAN is being used, what breaks when a network grows to millions of devices, and how the technology is starting to work alongside satellites rather than competing only with cellular.
Where The 150 Million Came From
The figure was reported by IoT Business News on 22 September, based on the LoRa Alliance’s latest numbers.
25 Million Devices In Nine Months
LoRaWAN had reached 125 million deployed devices at the end of 2025. The new total means roughly 25 million devices were added in the first nine months of 2026. The Alliance continues to report a compound annual growth rate of about 25% across its ecosystem.
The ecosystem around those devices has grown too. The Alliance counts more than 340 member organisations, including 45 that joined during 2026, more than 695 certified devices and close to 1,000 products listed in its marketplace.
The Big Networks Behind The Total
A few large operators account for a meaningful share of the total. Among the examples cited:
• ZENNER Connect reports more than 11.6 million sensors and 174,000 gateways across 15 countries.
• Netmore has 11.2 million active devices on its network.
• The Things Industries reports 6 million connected devices.
• Veolia operates more than 4 million active smart meters in France.
On the hardware side, RAKwireless says it has shipped more than 2 million LoRaWAN modules for uses including agriculture, asset tracking and industrial monitoring.
These figures come from the companies themselves and are not independently audited. Taken together, though, they show that LoRaWAN is no longer a collection of pilots. Several networks now operate at a scale comparable to national utility programmes.
Beyond The Smart Meter
The most telling shift is in what the devices do. Metering remains a large source of volume, but it is no longer the only story.
Locks, Pallets And Bicycles
The new deployments span objects that share a simple profile: they need to report occasionally, run for a long time on a battery and work across wide areas. Smart padlocks report whether they are open or closed. Tracked pallets report where they are. Bicycles report location for theft recovery or fleet management.
These are exactly the conditions LoRaWAN was designed for. As we explained in our guide to the networks built to whisper, low-power wide-area networks trade speed for range and battery life. A lock or a pallet has little to say, but needs to say it reliably for years.
Diversity matters for the technology’s future. A standard that depends on a handful of very large metering contracts is exposed if those contracts slow down. A standard spread across logistics, security, industry and safety has a broader base.
Safety Badges In Schools And Workplaces
One of the more striking examples comes from personal safety. CENTEGIX reports that more than 800,000 people use its LoRaWAN-based CrisisAlert badges daily in schools and workplaces. The badges let staff raise an alarm and share their location during an emergency.
It is an application that would have seemed unlikely for LoRaWAN a few years ago. It depends on reliable indoor coverage, timely delivery of alerts and long battery life in a device people wear every day. Its scale suggests the technology has matured beyond its original niche.
Scale Brings New Problems
When a network holds thousands of devices, radio coverage is the main concern. When it holds millions, the hard problems move up the stack: getting devices onto the network, managing their settings, keeping them working across different networks and replacing them over time.
Onboarding Without Manual Work
Adding a device to a LoRaWAN network has often required someone to enter its details by hand or rely on vendor-specific tools. That works for a pilot. It becomes a serious cost when devices arrive by the pallet.
In August, the LoRa Alliance introduced new specifications aimed at automated onboarding. TS014 lets networks retrieve device profiles automatically, removing manual data entry and proprietary workarounds. TS018 encodes the location of the device profile server in the QR code printed on each device, so scanning the code can start setup without errors from typing.
Alper Yegin, the Alliance’s chief executive, described the aim: “Every manual step in provisioning a new device, and every location a gateway can’t economically reach, creates friction that slows IoT deployments from reaching scale.”
Reaching Where Gateways Can’t
The second part of that quote points to coverage gaps. Some locations are too remote, too deep or too awkward to justify a gateway. LoRaWAN’s relay feature lets a device pass messages on behalf of others that cannot reach a gateway directly. The Alliance’s new technical guidance, TR016, is meant to help developers build products that use relay reliably.
For utilities and building operators, relay offers a way to reach the last few percent of devices, the meters in the deepest basements or the sensors at the edge of a site, without adding infrastructure for each one.
The Roadmap To 2028
The August specifications are part of a longer plan. In June, the Alliance set out a three-year roadmap for LoRaWAN focused on making the technology easier to integrate and operate, rather than on radio performance alone.
2026 And 2027: Plug-And-Play And Standard Interfaces
For 2026, the roadmap includes walk-by and drive-by reading, which lets mobile base stations collect data from devices as they pass, as well as satellite discovery enhancements and plug-and-play onboarding. For 2027, it lists zero-touch onboarding improvements, DNS-based discovery of network infrastructure, standard interfaces between network servers and gateways and between network servers and applications, support for crypto agility and gateway certification.
Several of these items address a long-standing complaint from integrators: different LoRaWAN vendors have often handled the same tasks in different ways. Standard interfaces reduce the effort of mixing equipment and software from multiple suppliers.
Industrial And Utility Integration
The roadmap also targets the systems that LoRaWAN data must feed. It includes an OPC UA mapping for industrial environments, support for the UI-1203 protocol used by water meters in North America, and a capability discovery feature that lets network servers download information about a device from external servers. For 2028, it lists a standard application data format for payload decoding and a network analytics API.
For industrial buyers, the OPC UA work is especially relevant. OPC UA is widely used to move data between machines and plant systems, as we covered in our explainer on industrial IoT and industrial connectivity. A standard mapping would make it easier to bring LoRaWAN sensor data into existing factory software without custom integration.
LoRaWAN Meets Satellite
Terrestrial networks, however dense, leave gaps across oceans, deserts, farmland and remote infrastructure. LoRaWAN is increasingly being extended into space to fill them.
In early September, Netmore announced it would add connectivity from French satellite operator Kinéis to its LoRaWAN networks across the 18 countries where it operates. According to IoT Business News, devices can switch automatically between terrestrial LoRaWAN and satellite links through Netmore’s ThingPark platform, with no manual intervention. Kinéis operates a constellation of 25 satellites dedicated to IoT.
The target uses include logistics tracking in remote areas, water infrastructure, tank monitoring and environmental sensing, including wildfire detection. Hybrid devices are already available from several vendors. Both companies support the LoRa Alliance’s work on satellite discovery, which aims to standardise how LoRaWAN devices find and connect to satellite constellations.
The framing matters. Rather than treating satellite as a separate service with separate devices, this approach treats it as an extension of the existing low-power network. For customers, that could mean one device design, one platform and a fallback when the ground network runs out.
Consolidation Among Network Operators
As LoRaWAN grows, its business structure is changing. Netmore is a clear example. The Swedish company bought US operator Senet in 2024, and in January 2026 it acquired French software firm Actility, whose ThingPark software runs many operator LoRaWAN networks. That combination gives one company a large footprint as both a network operator and a software supplier.
Consolidation can bring benefits for customers: broader coverage, simpler roaming between networks and fewer contracts to manage. It also concentrates influence over parts of an open standard’s ecosystem. Buyers will want to see how open interfaces, the roaming agreements and the Alliance’s standardisation work keep the market competitive as larger players emerge.
What The Milestone Does And Doesn’t Mean
A figure of 150 million devices is significant, but it is worth keeping in perspective. IoT Analytics estimated more than 20 billion connected IoT devices worldwide by the end of 2025, most of them using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular. LoRaWAN is one important part of that picture, strongest in battery-powered devices that send small amounts of data over wide areas.
The milestone also does not settle the competition between LoRaWAN and cellular low-power technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M. Each has strengths. Cellular options benefit from operator networks that already cover large areas. LoRaWAN benefits from the ability to build private networks, avoid per-device operator fees in some models and deploy in places operators do not prioritise. The more useful view, and the one many operators are now taking, is that LoRaWAN increasingly works alongside cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and satellite rather than replacing any of them.
What the milestone does show is maturity. An ecosystem with hundreds of member companies, hundreds of certified devices, multi-million-device networks and a roadmap focused on onboarding and integration is past the experimental stage.
What Buyers Should Ask
For organisations considering LoRaWAN for a new deployment, the growth of the ecosystem widens the choice of devices and networks. It also raises questions worth settling early.
Will you use a public network, run a private one or combine the two? Public operators remove the need to install and maintain gateways, while a private network gives full control over coverage and data inside a site.
How will devices be onboarded? With the new specifications arriving, it is worth asking vendors whether their devices and network servers support automated profile retrieval and QR-code-based setup, or whether each device still needs manual entry.
What happens at the edges of coverage? Relay devices, walk-by reading and satellite fallback can each help, but they add cost and complexity. Mapping where devices will actually sit, and testing there, remains more reliable than coverage maps.
How will data reach existing systems? If the data must flow into plant software, utility billing or logistics platforms, the integration work may matter more than the radio link. Standard mappings such as the planned OPC UA work could reduce that effort over time.
And who owns the relationship? With consolidation among operators, buyers should understand whose network and software they depend on, and how easily they could move if needed.
From Meters To Everything Small
LoRaWAN’s first large market was the smart meter, and it remains an important one. The next phase looks different. The devices are smaller, more varied and more personal: a lock on a gate, a tag on a pallet, a badge on a teacher’s lanyard.
Supporting that variety at scale is less about radio range than about everything around it: how devices are added, how they are described to the network, how they move between networks and how their data reaches the systems that use it. The LoRa Alliance’s recent work suggests it understands that. Whether the ecosystem can deliver it smoothly across many vendors and operators will decide how far past 150 million the technology goes.
