Cisco pulls out of LoRaWAN market

It made the end-of-life/end-of-sale announcement on its Website with little fanfare, letting customers know that their last chance for placing an order is 1 January 2025.

Cisco's LoRaWAN portfolio consists of rugged gateways and routers. Engineers will continue to provide software updates for these products until the beginning of January 2026, and will continue to address any security vulnerabilities until 31 December of that year.

The deadline for customers that want to extend their service and support contracts is 1 April 2029; Cisco will withdraw all support services at the end of that year.

After that, customers will have to figure out what to do next for themselves.

"There is no replacement available for the Cisco LoRaWAN at this time," Cisco said. "Cisco will be exiting the LoRaWAN space. There is no planned migration for Cisco LoRaWAN gateways."

On the face of it, a big name like Cisco axing its LoRa portfolio could be interpreted as a sign of deterioration in the market.

However, it is more likely that this development is more to do with Cisco's ongoing cost-cutting drive.

The company in August announced it would shed 7% of its workforce, which equates to thousands of jobs, and is the second round of redundancies Cisco has carried out so far this year. Cisco explained that the cuts will enable it to invest in new growth opportunities like AI.

A corporate rejig is also underway, as Cisco integrates its Networking, Security, and Collaboration teams into a single unit headed up by Jeetu Patel, who before that was in charge of those last two divisions. Cisco's head of Networking, Jonathan Davidson, stepped down from his role and now advises CEO Chuck Robbins.

Against this backdrop, it is easy to see how the LoRaWAN unit – a relatively small business in comparison to routers and switches – could find its way onto the chopping block.

"I wouldn't count Cisco as a tier 1 gateway vendor in the LoRaWAN space, and its foray into LoRaWAN has always been more of a side-note to the more traditional router business," explained Matt Hatton, founding partner at research firm Transforma Insights, to Telecoms.com.

Smaller, specialist vendors like MultiTech, Kerlink, and The Things Industries (TTI) – which focused primarily on LoRaWAN network servers until September when it launched its first gateway – will be "only too happy to pick up any business that used to go to Cisco," he said.

"The LoRaWAN ecosystem, certainly for private gateway deployments, is vibrant," he added.

Indeed, according to Transforma, non-cellular low power wide area networking technologies – including LoRaWAN – will account for 470 million IoT connections this year, rising to more than 1.4 billion by 2030.

"In terms of private low power network technologies, LoRaWAN is still substantially the most popular and most proven option, and the ongoing evolution is steady and sensible," said Hatton. "I don't see much that's going to shake its dominance."