EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Mohamad Nasser, general manager of Sprint’s IoT business unit, said the money in low power wide area (LPWA) networks won’t come from connectivity, but rather from services and analytics capabilities.

According to Nasser, low power IoT connectivity isn’t much of a revenue generator on its own. In fact, looking at the connectivity piece alone, Nasser said it would be “very tough” to generate substantial revenue. He noted it would take “huge volumes” of connected devices to create a “good enough” business model.

So Sprint, he said, is taking a different tack.

“That’s why what we’re trying to do is to kind of move up that value chain, and be able to offer services and data analytics,” Nasser told Mobile World Live, adding: “I think that’s where things start to get a little bit more, I would say, nice and heavy. Because it’s with all these connections with low power data – the analytics that’s going to come out of it, I think is going to create a lot of value for our customers, and then you will see some of that revenue come.”

More from Nasser on Sprint’s LPWA IoT network plans (including ambitions to launch LTE-M next year followed by NB-IoT) and what verticals the operator is focusing on first can be found here.