This is opportunistic and free for everyone to use. For a big number of use cases you need licensed spectrum to ensure some minimum standards of communication. Imagine what happens when a lot of WiFi access points are in the same small neighborhood.

LoRaWAN is protocol build for LoRa physical layer, and it is opportunistic. Because of the fact that you can't have every message ACKed makes it unreliable in my opinion (workout minimum standards).

However I've seen that there is proprietary protocol symphonylink from LinkLabs, that uses LoRa. They claim that it allows for having every frame ACKed, even bulk data uplink (OTA firmware upgrades). If so, I would tend to pick such technology for pond water telemetry.

> remote monitoring of water levels in wetlands and ponds spread across a few hundred square miles of mostly-rural area.

But wouldn’t it work for this use case he had?

It is possible. Unlicensed technologies have their advantages as well. You should check how the trade offs of each solution manifest on your use case and pick the proper one. For example in some cases, Lowrawan has better energy consumption, thus the battery of the sensor could last longer.

I believe that in the long term and as the number of devices per unit of area increases, licensed technologies will be the only viable option.

Isn't lora very low speed?

It is, but if you need to send water level twice a day, then you don't need much speed.

That's true but most of the examples in this article don't play to the strength of lora (extremely long range) and seem to involve its weakness (speed)