What Smart Buildings Need to Fully Adopt IoT

Smart Building technology promises lower operating costs, better energy efficiency, and healthier indoor environments—but many projects never reach their full potential. In this article, we’ll explore why so many initiatives stall at the pilot stage, the key obstacles holding the industry back, and the practical changes needed to scale IoT across entire building portfolios. By the end, you’ll see how the right approach can turn a promising pilot into a long-term success story.

Why Are So Many Smart Building Initiatives Stuck at the Pilot Stage?

Many large-scale Smart Building projects never make it past the pilot stage. The main reason? Current Building Management Systems (BMS), critical infrastructure, and many IoT technologies aren’t designed for cost-effective, straightforward upgrades at scale.

Traditional BMS systems are usually wired, fragmented, and expensive to upgrade. This makes full-building or multi-building rollouts financially and logistically challenging.

The wireless technologies often used in pilots—Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and other proprietary options—struggle in large buildings. Their limited coverage (typically 90–100 dB RF link budget) and high interference in the 2.4 GHz spectrum cause poor reliability. They often can’t cover more than one floor, suffer from interference, depend on unstable mesh networks, and require frequent battery replacement.

As a result, many pilots deliver misleading results—suggesting Smart Building projects are too costly and complex to scale—when in reality, the problem is choosing the wrong wireless foundation.

How LoRaWAN® Changes the Game

LoRaWAN® solves these challenges. Operating in the 870 MHz and 915 MHz unlicensed spectrums with minimal noise, it is built for long-range, low-power IoT applications. With a typical 150 dB RF link budget, LoRaWAN can cover 4–6 floors indoors and deliver battery life of more than 5 years (often up to 10).

Anyone can deploy LoRaWAN gateways and devices, and leading suppliers like TEKTELIC offer solutions that work natively with existing BMS platforms—regardless of manufacturer or protocol. That means any building with a BMS can be upgraded with LoRaWAN devices and sensors, managed by the same facility team, with no specialized IoT training and no disruption to operations.

What’s Holding the Industry Back?

Let’s review what’s really stopping Smart Building IoT from moving beyond small pilots. While the technology promise is there, several roadblocks still stand in the way:

• Legacy infrastructure – Most BMS platforms were never built for expansion or integration with modern IoT. Collecting IoT data without acting on it offers little value, and integrating standalone IoT platforms is expensive and slow. The more effective path is not replacing the BMS, but integrating IoT into the systems facility managers already use.
• Perceived cost and complexity – Many stakeholders assume scaling Smart Building solutions requires wiring, high labour costs, complex integration, or even replacing the BMS. This is not the case with LoRaWAN, which can integrate seamlessly with existing systems.
• Lack of awareness – Many facility managers don’t realize how simple, cost-effective, and efficient LoRaWAN is. It provides long-range communication, up to 10-year battery life, and straightforward BACnet/Modbus integration for retrofits.
• Fragmented ownership and decision-making – Building owners, facility managers, maintenance teams, and BMS integrators often work in silos with different goals. Without shared ownership and a clear upgrade path, pilots rarely move to deployment.

What Needs to Change for Smart Buildings to Scale?

Over the past several years, our team has worked closely with building owners, facility managers, and integrators to introduce IoT solutions that cut energy consumption, reduce operating costs, increase space utilization, and create healthier indoor environments.

One thing has become clear: technology alone doesn’t guarantee success. Many promising pilots still fail because they lack the right foundation for scale. Moving from a single building trial to a full portfolio rollout requires a shift in mindset, the right wireless infrastructure, and an approach that works with—not against—existing systems.

With that in mind, let’s break down the three most important decisions for taking Smart Building projects from pilot to portfolio:

1. Adopt the right wireless technology: Smart buildings won’t scale with Wi-Fi, BLE, Zigbee, or Z-Wave and other proprietary solutions. LoRaWAN, with its long-range, deep indoor penetration, long battery life, large ecosystem of devices, and native integration with BMS protocols, today provides the most cost effective and efficient options that has been tested and proven to work.

2. Upgrade, not replacement, existing BMS: The industry must stop viewing modernization as “rip and replace” current hardware or software solutions. The reality is that adding LoRaWAN sensors and solutions to wide variety of existing BMS solutions allows facility managers monitor in real-time all building parameters, its occupancy and utilization, to reduce its operating and maintenance cost, ESG compliance at fraction of the cost of wired solutions, with no operational downtime, and no change to exiting supply change the industry is built upon. 

3. Focus on real benefits and outcomes, not technology or even solutions: Scaling must be tied to measurable outcomes: reduced energy consumption, improved utilization, reduced operating and maintenance costs, improved tenant wellness, and compliance with ESG decarbonization mandates.

Conclusion

Smart Building technology is no longer limited by imagination—it’s limited by the way we approach deployment. The pilot stage isn’t the end goal, but too many projects stop there because they rely on short-range wireless, fragmented systems, and costly “rip and replace” upgrades.

The path forward is clear:

• Choose a wireless technology designed for scale, reliability, and low operating costs.
• Work with the systems already in place, not against them.
• Measure success by tangible results, not by the number of devices installed.

LoRaWAN® provides a proven, cost-effective way to achieve these goals, making it possible to retrofit existing buildings, connect them to existing BMS platforms, and scale across entire portfolios—without the complexity or expense of traditional approaches.

When technology, infrastructure, and business objectives align, Smart Buildings can move from concept to reality—delivering real energy savings, improved tenant comfort, and measurable returns across every property in the portfolio.