Commercial building automation
Commercial building automation is the practical evolution of long-promised ‘smart buildings’, and a cornerstone of smart city projects. In practice, commercial building automation means making existing buildings measurable, controllable, and compliant at scale. It is also a high-growth IoT market, driven by the convergence of tighter regulation, rising operational costs, and the need to modernize long-lived building assets.
$281bn
Value of building automation systems market by 2030
4 billion
IoT devices in commercial buildings by 2030
11.8%
CAGR of building automation systems market 2025-2034
These three forces shape market demand. Regulators are tightening energy efficiency and carbon reporting rules across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. Building owners must now demonstrate their consumption levels, not just reduce them. Aging commercial stock further compounds the challenge. Retrofitting connectivity is cheaper and faster than full building rewires, and this favors wireless solutions. Lastly, facilities teams want fewer vendors and simpler architectures, which pushes intelligence to the edge rather than into bespoke building management systems.
Commercial building automation relies on a dense layer of connected endpoints rather than a single central system. These include HVAC controllers, smart meters, air quality sensors, lighting controls, access systems, elevators, digital signage, and mobile maintenance assets. Many of these devices operate in locations where ethernet is impractical, requiring alternative forms of connectivity.
Challenges in the commercial building automation market
Regulatory compliance is shifting from efficiency targets to continuous proof
In many regions, commercial buildings now sit under mandatory energy performance and emissions frameworks. For example, in the EU, the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive requires member states to tighten minimum energy performance standards for existing non-residential buildings, with a clear trajectory toward deep renovation and decarbonization. In parallel, Building Automation and Control Systems requirements mandate automation and monitoring in larger buildings to ensure energy use is visible and optimised. Similarly, the UK’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards already restrict the leasing of inefficient commercial properties, with further tightening expected. In the US, city-level laws such as New York’s Local Law 97 impose direct emissions caps, backed by financial penalties.
Relevant product categories
The practical impact is that compliance increasingly depends on granular, continuous data. Annual audits or spreadsheet-based reporting are no longer sufficient. Building owners must collect, retain, and report energy and system data across HVAC, lighting, and metering, often across multi-site portfolios. Commercial building automation systems therefore need reliable connectivity and consistent data flows, not just local control.
Commercial building automation requires reliable connectivity across diverse environments – Quectel provides:
Wireless connectivity enables automation without rewiring or reliance on existing building networks
Vast optionality across Wi-Fi, GNSS, LPWA, Cat 1 bis, 4G, and 5G enables efficient deployments across sites and use cases
Pre-certified modules and antennas simplify compliance and reduce SKU complexity
Over-the-air updates and diagnostics reduce maintenance effort over long asset lifecycles
Retrofitting existing buildings remains structurally difficult
Most commercial buildings were constructed before digital automation was assumed. They often contain a mix of aging building management systems, proprietary controllers, and local networks installed at different times. Replacing these systems wholesale is rarely viable. Full rewiring disrupts tenants, inflates costs, and delays compliance timelines. As a result, automation projects must work around existing constraints.
In practice, this means supporting hybrid environments where modern sensors and controllers coexist with legacy protocols such as BACnet or Modbus. Edge devices must aggregate data locally, translate between systems, and operate reliably even where building-wide networks are inconsistent or unavailable. Connectivity solutions that depend on uniform wired infrastructure often struggle to scale across diverse building estates.
Operational scale and lifecycle risk drive architecture decisions
Commercial building automation assets are expected to operate for a decade or more, often outliving the IT systems around them. Over that lifecycle, facilities management teams must manage firmware updates, security requirements, vendor changes, and regulatory evolution. Connectivity choices directly affect this burden. Solutions tightly coupled to local IT networks or short product lifecycles increase operational risk and maintenance costs.
For property owners managing large or distributed portfolios across commercial real estate, consistency is critical. They need architectures that allow devices to be deployed, monitored, and maintained in a repeatable way across regions and building types. This favors approaches that minimize dependence on site-specific infrastructure and simplify long-term support.
Relevant products
MCU Bluetooth HCM010S
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth FGS060N
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth FLM263D
The value Quectel adds in commercial building automation
At a systems level, commercial building automation relies on a dense layer of connected endpoints rather than a single central system. These include HVAC controllers, smart meters, air quality sensors, lighting controls, access systems, elevators, digital signage, and mobile maintenance assets. Many of these devices operate in locations where ethernet is impractical, requiring alternative forms of connectivity. These can be quite diverse depending on application and context. For example, Wi-Fi may serve many use cases but in others it may be unsuitable or networks may be too costly to maintain. In such cases, cellular becomes the default for resilience, coverage, and lifecycle simplicity.
Our array of modules, antennas and related services can support this diversity without forcing a single connectivity model. NB-IoT and LTE Cat M suit low-power sensors such as temperature, humidity, CO₂ and occupancy in addition to energy meters, all of which assist with energy management in the building. LTE Cat 1 provides a step up for controllers, gateways, and panels that need higher reliability, firmware updates, or regional roaming. 4G and 5G modules support edge gateways that aggregate building data, connect legacy protocols like BACnet or Modbus, and push data securely into cloud platforms.
Our suite of GNSS products can also play an important role. In large commercial estates, campuses, or distributed property portfolios, accurate location and timing helps with asset tracking, maintenance scheduling, fault correlation, and commissioning. Here, GNSS provides operational positioning and synchronization.
Our broad portfolio enables specific outcomes that matter to building owners and integrators. These include faster retrofit deployments without rewiring and delivery of predictable connectivity costs over a 10–15-year building lifecycle. Our hardware comes pre-certified across regions, reducing SKU complexity for OEMs selling into multiple markets. This is backed up by our long-term product support and availability, which matters when devices are installed behind walls or ceilings and expected to run unattended.
