This is not entirely accurate. LoRa is a patented RF technology owned by Semtech. LoRaWAN is a standard maintained by the LoRa Alliance (which is not very different from other standards and marketing bodies). The Things Network (founded by @wienke and myself) is a developer community around LoRaWAN and a free to use cloud service intended for R&D and non-commercial use cases.

Yes, so GP is essentially correct.

Please don't astroturf a corporate driven "developer community"

> marketing bodies

There you go.

What is astroturf? If I Google it I see fake grass.

A "grassroots" initiative comes from the people. "Astroturf" is commercial or political interests that masquerade as grassroots.

You can get a LoRa transmitter/receiver for like $5 and setup your own network. Documentation and datasheets are freely available. They are really not printing money with that technology.

There isn't any opensource modulation scheme that comes even close to LoRa.

> They are really not printing money with that technology.

Not until it becomes widespread. For-profit companies are not charities and they patent things for a reason.

So it takes more than 5 dollars. You also need a gateway but you can get these for 99 dollars. Still this technology has a very low barrier to entry for such a long range and low power capability.

For people reading this since I'm certain wienke knows this, you can also do point to point or mesh LoRA between cheap devices (e.g. Meshtastic). You don't necessarily need a multi-channel gateway, depends on what you want to do.

You only need a gateway for LoRaWAN, you can do point to point or mesh LoRa without a gateway.