Some of my gateways (for instance Mikrotik) allow connection to multiple networks. Is there any reason not to connect to both V2 and V3 endpoints? I’m presuming V3 would deduplicate the extra packets coming in from V2
Connecting a gateway to multiple networks servers is ultimately not very workable for two reasons:
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There’s no way to de-conflict overlapping downlink requests, at least one would go untransmitted, and existing gateway<>server interactions don’t really have a way to inform the losing network server that it should assign the downlink to another gateway instead - most downlink requests that overlap in time will not overlap in frequency.
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Gateway airtime is typically tracked at the network server level, but there’s no way to know how much airtime the other server is using up. Gateways rarely track or enforce this themselves, even if they did there’s no real way to tell the server that they are out of budget such that it can assign the downlink to another gateway.
The idea of packet broker should have been an opportunity to fix these things; in practice it turns out it does not yet have the capability to.
Conversely at present in theory the only reason to connect a gateway directly to V3 rather than have it forward from V2 to V3 would be support of ABP devices registered with V3, for which forwarding can’t work. There’s a lot of argument against ABP (argument I don’t fully agree with given that OTAA has some design problems), but if you agree with that argument then you reach the conclusion many have been that gateways may as well be left on V2 for the moment.
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The NS is responsible for monitoring and tracking the duty cycle of the GW for tx (downlinks)…so you will potentially end up with both versions commanding downlinks thinking they have control and either breach limits or end up with conflicting requests with one gw loosing out…and never knowing!