I would like to set up a gateway in the outside of civilization somewhere in a bush and make it accessible via LTE uplink. I expect 3k-5k messages per day. I need to know what traffic I can expect so I can choose a cheap LTE subscription. What’s your experience and recommendation? Thank you for your input.
Cheap <> reliable = no data
You could estimate the traffic as being close to next to nothing for an LTE link as you’ll be uploading slightly less than a typical web page, so I’d spend the money on a good provider.
As for experience, I like Vodafone, but then I’m in the UK which probably doesn’t help you as we don’t know where you are.
Let’s take 4K messages, and grossly overestimate that each expands to 512 bytes of backhaul traffic (probably more like half that…)
That’s 2 megabytes a day, or 60 megabytes a month.
This puts you right off the bottom of “traditional” plans but you may end up paying a fairly high incremental cost in an IoT sort of plan.
My gut recommendation would be to get something like a 1 gigabyte plan in a way where you can adjust your future purchase, and then potential consider ramping that down.
If you do a pay-per-usage plan, you may want to spend time to put in some sort of cap so you don’t get a surprise bill.
Given the relatively little actual data, you may also want to consider what you might expend doing things like remote upgrades of the gateway software.
Whatever you do, don’t put the box kilometers out in the field without having first proven your remote monitoring and administration solution while it’s still sitting next to you!
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First, thank you for your quick feedback. I’m in Switzerland and here, data plans are still costly. I see data plans with 0.2mbps up and 0.4mbps download for “only” 5.–/month and unlimited (ok, with this speed it is limited) Data. With only a few Megabytes a month it would be possible to get one of this “slow” internet connections and it would work.
I would like to monitor my beehives with a LoRa Solution. LTE is available but my LoRa devices often don’t connect with my gateway (RSSI -121). This would fix the current issue and would extend the range for future applications.
The challenge is that the way TTN is set up means that while you don’t need a lot of speed, you do need fairly responsively low latency.
I’m not really sure if the round trip delay is going to correlated with the speed tier you chose.
If this is a sort of “nice to have” data situation, then a cheap plan and making sure you have some code on the gateway to throttle before you get overage charges could make sense.
If you really need performance, then cheaping out on the data plan is probably unwise, especially at the start.
Unfortunately, even if your own nodes could function uplink only (eg, ABP without ADR) putting up a gateway contributing to the public TTN with a data connection to laggy to permit the receive windows to be met would be a detriment to any other users in the area. Eg, if you find you have to go uplink only you probably need a private network server. The server-in-the-box idea with chirpstack or whatever can work for small isolated “island” setups… but that’s not really on topic here, as it doesn’t promote TTN the shared network.
Hi @geeklab, my advice is to start as follows:
- Make sure that you buy mobile network router hardware that covers all the E-UTRA radio bands used in Switzerland.
- Start with Pay As You Go (PAYG) SIM cards where you can create an online account and see the data usage.
- Start with the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) that actually run real networks in Switzerland.
- Carefully document any equipment configuration changes that you need to make for each MNO.
- Run it for a while to learn about reliability, latency, data usage, etc.
If that works well then you can experiment on more complex setups:
- Using SIM cards from Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) who may offer better deals and better online portals for SIM card management.
- Set up Pay Monthly (PAYM) deals including “fleet” deals if you have several gateways so that you can pool the data usage across multiple SIM cards.
- Using dual SIM card mobile routers with failover to get better reliability.
Whatever you do, please post it on the forum.
Hi Tim
Thank you for your feedback. I checked the local providers. All the plans for “private use” with a fixed amount of data are limited “data per month” plans and more expensive, then the slow but unlimited one. I will have to try it out 
I will 
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Just something to bear in mind if you intend to use 3G…it is being phased out in most places in the next couple of years.
(Whereas ironically 2G support will continue in most places beyond that date)