LoRaWAN enables us all to make the world better

I am motivated by making the world a better place. The emergence of LoRaWAN and the availability of increasingly smaller, cheaper and more efficient sensors and electronics provides new ways of improving the environment and the life of animals.  On-device AI allows exponentially more data to be captured, analysed and processed. Satellites, relays and meshes enabled hybridised networks that can deliver coverage exactly where it is needed for the least cost. Consequently many things are becoming possible at lower costs that will allow the health and wellbeing of animals, plants and equipment to be monitored with increasing fidelity. The knowledge gained can provide both immediate and longer term value.  

What sets us apart from many is that we focus end-to-end. We believe that only by optimising each element in the LoRaWAN technology value chain will you get an optimal solution. This covers devices (electronics, enclosures, fittings) to the firmware, to the network architecture (terrestrial, satellite, relay, mesh, etc) to the systems (logic, UI, etc). We aim to enable rapid iteration across this end-to-end spectrum i.e. adding sensors, updating messages, changing the rules and what a user sees on their phone in days of effort (not weeks or months).

Many try to apply a hobbyist approach and build unique LoRaWAN solutions with a ‘plug and play’ approach with off the shelf components, no-code systems etc. While that may quickly produce a PoC and even a Pilot it is not a strategy that we think will lead very directly, or affordably, to a fully optimised solution. It also doesn't effectively engage the end users or those seeking the value effectively enough i.e. too many variables are assumed to be fixed constraints (e.g. size, cost, messages, etc.).

One really needs to understand the materiality of the data and what exactly is required to allow decisions to be made. The goal must be to optimise LoRaWAN devices to do exactly what is needed and no more (to be sure there are no unnecessary components that can increase costs or complexity). One also needs to ensure devices do just what is essential to achieve the specific value sought while ensuring qualities of service (e.g. message rates, device life, etc.). By enabling dynamic control and visibility, users can monitor and adjust the state and behaviour of the devices, sensors, etc. so they live within their energy and bandwidth budgets.

We hide most of the complexity of LoRaWAN to ensure a simple user, and engineering, experience.  We have established a modular end-to-end technology framework that deals with many of the complex problems and many of the common business objects. We then enable solutions to be built on top of that framework that can do precisely what is required (hardware, firmware, network, software) for a specific scenario.  It has taken a great deal of work, experience and experimentation to find the right balance between achieving reuse and allowing specialisation.

 

Coverage challenges for LoRaWAN IoT solutions

 One of the great advantages of LoRaWAN solutions is that one can avoid the rapacious charging and network lock-ins that Telcos have traditionally made an art form of. Some of us are old enough to remember paying Telcos a dollar a txt message (i.e. for a service of so little truly marginal cost to them they were often unable to calculate a txt message's cost precisely; and that eventually reduced in cost by three or four orders of magnitude or made entirely free). 

Another great advantage of LoRaWAN is that one can use existing networks where they are available (at a fair price) from a network utility and extend the network to places only you require at your time, convenience and cost. It is hard for a network utility to extend its network for a single user. Telco's are also focused on providing 5 nines quality of service while for the vast majority of IoT solutions, 2-3 nines is adequate and the marginal cost of extending this to get an extra 2-3 nines can not be economically justified.

If you have thousands, hundreds or, or possibly just tens, of devices in well-defined areas with no LoRaWAN current coverage it will often make sense for you to add in your own gateways i.e. otherwise you will pay pennies for each device each month and those pennies will add up.

There are several mechanisms for extending LoRaWAN coverage and they each have their pros and cons e.g. gateways (which will require backhaul and power); relays (which can handle a small number of devices at the edge of a network); direct to satellite solutions (which will have latency and cost constraints); Mesh gateways (which require using proprietary protocols).  We have been working with all of these and think they all have roles to play.

When looking at extending a LoRaWAN network, you need to know exactly what coverage you need i.e. to know exactly where you need coverage and what qualities of service you need (based on device populations). If you are at the edge of coverage for a mobile phone you can perhaps move a few meters to get better coverage. Things can't do this if they are fixed and don't know how to do this if they are mobile. So you need to know as well as you can the areas and places that coverage is needed at.

All the LoRaWAN solutions we create allow coverage to be collated and mapped.  We also dynamically track network congestion and outages. The areas and places which are surveyed to assess coverage are an expression of network requirements. These features allow both monitoring of current performance and predictive assessment of potential future gaps or issues e.g. we can see an area is becoming congested before that level of congestion materially affects the utility of the system. Our coverage measurement approach is network agnostic and will work with a mix of public and private gateways.

Our approach for extending LoRaWAN networks is predicated on as precise an understanding of the requirements as possible and a continuous assessment of the current state.