I hope this message finds you well. I am currently in the process of exploring the feasibility of deploying a community LoRaWAN gateway to support local IoT projects and initiatives. As many of you here might appreciate, the deployment and ongoing maintenance of such infrastructure involves certain costs, including hardware, internet connectivity, electricity, and potential site rental fees.
Given the community-driven nature of these projects, I’m reaching out to gather insights and experiences from the community on sustainable revenue models. Specifically, I am interested in understanding if there are established practices or innovative approaches that can at least cover the costs associated with deploying and maintaining a community LoRaWAN gateway. My goal is to ensure the long-term viability of the gateway without imposing undue financial burdens on the users or the community at large.
Questions:
Have any of you implemented or are aware of revenue models that successfully cover the costs of community LoRaWAN gateway deployment and maintenance?
Are there examples of partnerships, sponsorships, or community funding initiatives that have supported your gateway operations?
How do you manage operational costs while keeping the network accessible and free for community users?
Any advice or pitfalls to avoid when considering the financial aspects of running a community gateway?
I am eager to learn from your experiences and look forward to any advice, suggestions, or case studies you can share. Your insights will be invaluable in helping to shape a sustainable model for our community gateway project.
Thank you for your time and willingness to share your knowledge.
If you can raise funds or get someone to buy a standard outdoor gateway with reasonable antenna, perhaps €/£/$300, then the network & electricity costs are so negligible that anyone with a property in a decent position could host it and not even know it was there.
If you end up with community money you end up with a committee and due-diligence and meetings and accountability and annual reports etc. Time better spent on recruiting & educating potential users, deploying devices and chatting up a local tech business to buy & host another gateway.
At TTN Madrid we have come to the conclusion that the best way to deploy a LoRaWAN community network is that ours members will like to install gateway because they are useful to themselves.
For this reason we strive to organize introductory workshops to TTN, LoRaWAN home automation, industrial and smart farming applications, and gateway configuration.
Our goal is to find applications with benefits that outweigh the cost of purchasing and maintaining an individual gateway.
Hiya,
A community network is a great idea, and definitely worthwhile being involved in.
In Reading our network grew from a couple of enthusiasts running lorawan workshops and getting other enthusiasts to join in. We have talks to other community groups who were thought might be interested.
We persuaded a few venues to host gateways (a hackspace, a co working space, a museum…, but mostly we hosted gateways in our apartments, attics, rooftops.
This way there are negligible running costs and we can put all our attention into doing fun things with the network
