I thought I start a discussion on what motivates you other node operators to pay for expensive radio hardware which can go to hundreds of dollars, electricity and internet bills to run your nodes?
Well I get it for most of us the infrastructure is already there and who cares about a couple of kbytes extra at the end of the month on their traffic.
However incentivizing the network (now with that we are way over the epoch of crypto currencies +10 years) would be super easy. My suggestion is to pay a small amount for each node operators (at least something that small to pay back their board in 1-2 years) with this you could get more participants.
My original goal with this project was to build a long distance weather station which never happened so I just running my node for free to help the community relay messages since 3 years lately I made a small upgrade which did not involve investing in more hardware I just put it into a box outside to have better coverage.
Can I suggest you start by getting the terms for the different components right? From your description I think you are talking about gateways, not nodes.
Having invested several thousands on buying and deploying gateways and footing a monthly bill for 3g connectivity for those gateways where there is no other connectivity option I invest a lot of euros to create free coverage for the community. I would rather not get involved in payment schemes. For me I would rather encourage others to invest the (these days) more modest amount of about 120 euros for a gateway and add it the the network to increase coverage.
I would also encourage to deploy an open, free, neutral, useful and secure citizenās IoT network.
Iām afraid that initially the reward of operating a gateway is only the coverage for your own nodes, but as more people get involved, you will also enjoy the coverage created by these other users.
I think itās very important to persuade our friends, relatives and colleagues about the benefits of TTN.
We donāt necesarily need money to incentivize the installation of more gateways; the incentive should be the use cases.
If we are able to show that something as easy as a door sensor or a pet tracker can be set up by anyone (not just computer nerds), the number of gateway should increase.
People will use community gateways, but will also install their owns to make sure that they are always available (this should impove the redundancy of the network).
Well assuming you mean paying people for installing āGatewaysā and not ānodesā.
Assume a gateway and its installation and running costs are as low as Ā£150 over two years.
Where do you think that sort of money would come from ?
If the āincentivizingā went global then TTN might need to lay out very large amounts of money, and I doubt that their bank accounts are overflowing with spare cash ā¦
Fon (and their foneras) tried to pay users for sharing their wifi connections.
This arose a lot of problems here is Spain becouse you (a citizen) cannot get paid without meeting some legal requisities that involve paying about 300ā¬ per month.
This business model was a fiasco.
What motivates me to help is that Iām basically a nerd for cool radio technology and I think the idea of sharing a radio network is similar to the ideas behind free software. The cost of electricity and network bandwidth (to me personally) is negligible.
I donāt think that money provides a good long-term motivator, at least for me.
People who are in it for the money will probably also leave the platform quite quickly.
What Iām seeing in the past few years is that ācitizen-scienceā projects are really taking off, for example measuring air quality, environmental noise levels. I think this is a great match to TTN. Already Iām seeing people in dutch communities seeking collaboration with municipal government, like setting up sensors, with the municipality providing means (money for the gateway and a good antenna location) to place a LoRaWAN gateway. IMO, this is a really nice mode of cooperation.
In our community we have started collaboration between companies government and citizenās to run projects and fund new infrastructure and operate existing infrastructure. Doing so we found the incentive to enable more useage and have new inititiatives runn on our gateways.
The financial incentive like in Helium seems attractive but in my opinion it cannot compete with a true community initiative like with TTN.
Satisfaction like with TTN can compete easily with money like in Helium.
lately I made a small upgrade which did not involve investing in more hardware I just put it into a box outside to have better coverage.