TTN is free to use and free af charge.
But: is there a FUP in numbers of sensors or gateways that you may add in your free TTN tenant? …. Before you are “forced’ to move to the paid version TTI?
I can not find info about this in heir website.
Marc
There is (currently) no limit. However TTI sponsors the infrastructure for the community network which is expensive due to the heavy load caused for a large part by commercial parties. If you are making money deploying nodes you should deploy on a commercial instance and pay your dues.
The community network is for learning and community projects, it is not fair to use it for commercial deployments making money when TTI pays the bills.
3 Likes
Hi @kersing
Thanx for the clear answer. And… right to the point.
Maybe TTN should build in a max on sensors… just in case someone wants to add to much sensors…… but than: what would that max number be……100… 250… 500?
I have now build a network www.ttn0478.nl with 22 gateways covering about 160km2 (gemeente Venray) using TTN with a goal to use it for schools, students and anyone who wants to get into LoRa.
And ofcourse: creating a great coverage for the TTN network for any sensor visiting the surrounings of Venray
Marc
1 Like
“Just in case” - lol - there are forum posts with home users with 100+ sensors and some heavily disguised support situations where 1,000’s are in the mix. At one point in the v2 to v3 migration there was a cap put on the number of MQTT connections to an application to keep the servers stable - it was set at fifty - yes, that’s right, 50!! Some lazy user didn’t replicate their data out, they used TTN to distribute it far and wide to each data consumer!
This is really what TTN as a community focused on an area and having gateways is the all important part of the infrastructure. So if a middle school or college wanted to do a project where a whole year group, say 90 pupils, all had a low cost sensor, the school could register an account to make it clear that it is a community activity.
I think the most important line that can be crossed is if someone is earning a living from it all. But then that gets fuzzy, what if you have a part time community co-ordinator / tech support / gateway maintenance because your area has many gateways and many users? I guess if they are not the legal entity that takes the income and it is a legally registered non-profit, that’s OK.
The two things I’d note from your site is the ‘shop’ muddies the waters a bit but email enquiries rather than a cart does say convenience for local non-techies. And realtime GPS tracking as a use case is a heavily discussed topic that tends towards “don’t do it, coverage & uplink frequency makes it patchy”. Asset tracking is different (stop moving, phone home).
As for the shop & income, where should the line be drawn - if a community is paying for gateway coverage, both in terms of adding in gateways and paying for mobile internet, public money (grants & donations) keeps it clearly non-profit. But how do you show from the sale of devices that it is a non-profit activity? I guess it means someone has to do the legal entity paperwork & draw up some accounts.
Do you have any case studies of student activity you can share - as that’s my main interest and it’s always good to see how it’s done else where. I’m hoping this September to get back to it now that we’ve got over the bulk of the issues with Covid etc.
1 Like
Adding on to this whilst hoping we get a view from @MarcVanBracht, interesting position from a business user looking to retrieve a TTIG as they’d lost track of who administered it and hadn’t reviewed the posts on the forum about such things.
How much can we expect in the way of help from TTI staff when we let ourselves down. I’m not perfect but after 28 years in business I’ve learnt what records to keep so that I can get on with things rather than drag others in to my admin cockups. This seems to me to be particularly important for a free service like TTN. Whilst I’m sure the TTI team have their special console to sort out the reoccurring ‘stuff’ like EUI issues for gateways & devices, but even if it only takes them two minutes per EUI to speed read the request and then press the buttons, with a potential pool of a few thousand users looking for a favour, I bet there are whole days lost each month untangling a pile of requests.
So as well as keeping our personal share of the server load down, we need to be on top of our admin as the staff costs are a very direct burden. An uplink may “cost”, using Bistromathics, around 0.00001c, but staff time is unlikely to be any less that €1 a minute.
1 Like
Hi Nick,
Free TTN network versus “ webshop”
I build my network where I started small and it got bigger en before I know i spend 15K on gateways and installations. (And many sensors).
People asked we where to buy sensors and I started a little webshop: very bad as it is right now
I have the same problem as TTI and TTN: do some for free, but where is the money so (my) TTN network can be up and running al the time.
Therefore I am thinking to do the same: TTN0478 for an open and free network: help anyone who is interested.
And a commercial version on TTI where I can sell IoT solutions to business customers
School & Students
I gave guest lectures at some high schools.
In september hopefully the first real assignments for students:
- building a light version dashboard om my TTN0478 network
- plot the gateways on a (google) map
- make them green / orange / red based on LAST SEEN (via gateway API)
- make counters on messages Uplink/downlink for stats per day/week/month/quaters
This is more ICT than IoT, but the next step is to het them into sensors
If the projectis up and running, I will nform you
Marc
Nick,
In the past I used Xclaim WiFi Access Points in my company Nox Telecom. Their cloud management platform was for free. Easy to use, simple, Xclaim was Ruckus Wireless.
Lot’s of resellers build large numbers of customers and AP’s on Xclaim: it was free to use (ofcourse you need to buy the hardware) and this services was sold into a monthly fee all over.
But than: Xclaim stopped their free services of managing the AP’s via the cloud. AND even worse; the stopped the portal completely: all customers needed new WiFi AP’s!
I am saying: TTN must stay forever, but the costs for this network must be in line with “ the revenue” where the revenue is the community and helping a lot of people getting into Iot and LoRaWAN. TTN services should not be sold to End Customers whre TTI pays the bill.
TO ALL:
Don’t abuse TTN and start a TTI if you are selling the service
We’re trying to find a balance between making the community network sustainable and making sure that the community network can be used freely for personal, educational and non-commercial projects.
The community network must become (financially) sustainable one way or the other. Currently its operations are sponsored by The Things Industries, which is fine and acceptable to a certain extent. But it is not in TTI’s interest nor in the interest of the community that this free tier growth is unbounded, putting the continuity of TTI directly and TTN indirectly at risk.
The problem we identified is that there are commercial users on the community network that represent a significant server load and cost. TTI is basically paying their cloud bills. This is not what the community network is intended for and we are going to put a halt to that.
Look, I totally understand why businesses use The Things Stack Community Edition. It’s free, it works almost as good as The Things Stack Cloud, you get community coverage included and maybe your non-commercial project escalated into a business and now it’s too hard to migrate. Also, some businesses feel that when they buy gateways, they also buy the right to use our cloud services for whatever purposes. We definitely see a responsibility for TTI to fix part of this and to make Cloud so attractive that people are happy spending money on it.
So, we are indeed planning an update of the terms to address this. But rest assured, eligible personal, educational and other non-commercial projects will not be capped by an arbitrary device limit.
9 Likes
Thanks for sharing