IoT Wireless Technologies Compared by Range: From NFC to Satellite

One of the first questions on any IoT project is deceptively simple: how far does the signal need to travel? A door sensor talking to a hub across the hallway and a soil probe reporting from the middle of a field have almost nothing in common, and no single wireless technology serves both well. Range sits at the centre of that trade-off, and it pulls power consumption, data rate, and cost along with it.

The technologies below are ordered roughly from the shortest reach to the longest. Keep in mind that the figures are indicative rather than guaranteed. Transmission power, frequency band, antenna design, and whatever happens to be in the way (walls, machinery, weather) all move the numbers around, sometimes dramatically.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

• Range: Extremely short — up to about 10 cm, and often only a couple of centimetres in practice.
• Use case: Deliberately close-range, contactless exchanges where proximity is the point: tap-to-pay, transit and access cards, keyless car entry, and pairing a phone with a speaker or headphones. That short reach is a security feature, not a limitation — a card only works when it is right next to the reader.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

• Range: Commonly 10–30 metres indoors, stretching to 100 metres or more with a clear line of sight and the long-range mode in Bluetooth 5.
• Use case: The workhorse for personal and short-range devices — wearables, earbuds, fitness trackers, retail beacons, and proximity sensing. Ubiquitous phone support is a big part of why it shows up almost everywhere.

Zigbee

• Range: Roughly 10–20 metres per hop indoors, and up to about 100 metres in open space.
• Use case: Home automation, industrial monitoring, and building management. Its real strength is the mesh: each mains-powered device relays for the next, so a network can blanket a whole house even though any single link is short.

Z-Wave

• Range: About 15–30 metres indoors, and up to 100 metres outdoors under good conditions.
• Use case: A smart-home staple for lights, locks, and sensors. Because it runs in the sub-gigahertz band (around 868 MHz in Europe and 908 MHz in North America) rather than the crowded 2.4 GHz band, it tends to pass through walls more cleanly and interferes less with Wi-Fi.

Thread

• Range: Around 20–30 metres per hop, extended much further across a mesh.
• Use case: Home and light industrial automation, and the network layer underneath many Matter devices. Thread is IP-native and self-healing, so devices route around a node that drops offline — though it does need a border router to reach the wider internet.

Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)

• Range: Typically 30–50 metres indoors, extendable with repeaters and mesh systems.
• Use case: The go-to when a device needs real bandwidth — cameras, streaming hubs, and anything moving large amounts of data in a home or office. The trade-off is appetite: Wi-Fi draws far more power than the low-energy protocols, so it is a poor fit for a coin-cell sensor meant to last for years.

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network)

• Range: Around 2–5 km in built-up areas and up to roughly 15 km across open countryside.
• Use case: Low-power, low-data applications spread over a wide area — agriculture, smart cities, utility metering, and environmental monitoring. It runs on unlicensed spectrum, which means you can build and own a private network without paying a carrier.

Sigfox (0G, operated by UnaBiz)

• Range: Roughly 3–10 km in cities and 30–50 km in rural areas.
• Use case: Very simple, very-low-data devices such as basic trackers and meters that send only a handful of small messages a day. It works as a subscription service on an operator-run network; the technology is now owned and run by UnaBiz after Sigfox's earlier restructuring.

NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT)

• Range: About 1 km in dense urban areas and up to 10 km in open rural settings, depending entirely on cellular coverage.
• Use case: Fixed, hard-to-reach sensors — utility meters in basements, agricultural probes, smart-city infrastructure. Because it uses licensed cellular spectrum and penetrates buildings well, it is dependable where unlicensed options struggle.

LTE-M (LTE for Machines)

• Range: Similar to NB-IoT — roughly 1–10 km depending on the network.
• Use case: Also cellular, but with higher data rates, lower latency, and support for mobility and voice. That makes it a better match for asset tracking, connected wearables, and anything that moves between cell towers while staying connected.

Satellite communications

• Range: Effectively global.
• Use case: The fallback when there is no terrestrial network at all — maritime tracking, pipelines, remote agriculture, and off-grid monitoring. A growing number of low-earth-orbit constellations are pushing satellite IoT toward smaller, cheaper, lower-power devices than were possible a few years ago.

Range at a glance

Choosing the right one

Range is the obvious dividing line, but it is rarely the only one that matters. A door sensor that needs to run for years on a coin cell, a camera that has to push video in real time, and a shipping container broadcasting its position from the middle of the ocean each point to a different technology — and none of those choices comes down to distance alone.

Before settling on a protocol, weigh range against the factors that travel with it: how much power the device can spare, how much data it needs to move and how often, how many nodes the network has to support, and whether you are relying on unlicensed spectrum you control or a carrier network you subscribe to. Local regulations and radio interference will shape the outcome too. The best fit is usually the technology that clears your range requirement with a little room to spare, while keeping everything else — battery life, cost, and complexity — comfortably within budget.