dconrad

Quite the contrary. Informal interviews provide no real information and cause interviewers to fall-back to stereotyping and unconscious bias. Formal interviews, done right, provide real data.

True in Europe (CE) but it works differently in the US (FCC).

The FCC limits time spent transmitting in a single channel ("time on air"), but there's no duty cycle limit if you follow the channel hopping rules.

Sounds like an interesting challenge. Hit us up if you'd like to try out Beep's kit -- daniel at beepnetworks dot com.

Good point. I meant ad hoc tower deployment, not ad hoc mesh networks. Our topology is (mostly) star. Will update to clarify.

Some folks have asked -- is this really a cellular network?

In the strictest sense, Yes -- it's a coordinated group of basestations which together form a large area network.

The network stacks are not (yet) a part of the 3GPP standard. Handoffs are different. Cells can overlap and don't need to be planned in the same way as traditional cellular networks.

But the reason for these differences is to make the network better for IoT -- battery life, number of devices supported, etc.

Also, if LoRaWAN and others aren't cellular, then neither are the emerging LTE IoT standards. They follow similar strategies.

Or, that's my view anyway. Thoughts?

Appears that TP-Link's heart is not in this -- they're doing the minimum to comply with FCC rules.

Will be interesting to watch the arms race between OpenWRT and the reluctant ODMs.

Maybe if you keep trying you'll get it right. :)

I love those guys go support them! But you will have to wait a while for their hardware.

that's 1600 devices simultaneously communicating. a sensor might only spend a fraction of a percent of its time transmitting data, so the number of devices supported is orders of magnitude higher.

nice, hit me up, daniel@

Yes, on the Continent, at least! I'm not sure about the UK.

Both LoRa and Sigfox came out of French companies, and several wireless carriers have announced plans to build networks. Also check out The Things Network guys in Amsterdam who are trying to crowdsource a network, very cool stuff.

Maybe -- throughput depends on which radio tech we're talking about, and the networks need to get built with density appropriate for the task.

LoRa radios that are close to a gateway can dynamically shift to a 300 Kbps mode, or down to a long-range mode that's ~10Kbps (but yes could also be degraded further by error rate if at edge-of-range).