I read about the fair use policy in this post by arjanvanb and I can’t help but wonder if it is actually the case.
As it stands in my current prototyping phase I tend to sent bursts of a couple messages within an hour every few hours with no delays in between messages or any other difficulties.
Is the fair use policy meant as a social principle or is it actually enforced by the network service? (currently or in the future?)
It’s currently not enforced, but it will be in the future. Of course, you should build your applications with the “don’t be an asshole”-principle in mind 
I definitely will, and I’m definitely not an asshole For now I’ll upscale to a higher speed during prototyping so I’ll fit the fair use. (Even though I think I’m the only one using my gateway atm…) And I geuss for the final product it will have to transfer to KPN or something.
Last questions:
- Am I correct that the fair use is based on the limits of the gateway and not the network service?
- If I don’t get a response to a confirmed uplink, meaning the packet was lost, and I transmit another confirmed uplink to replace it. Does this count as two sent messages towards the fair use cap or as one sent message?
Great! Then you don’t have to worry about anything. For prototyping we understand that you’ll probably send more messages and that’s not a problem. Just make sure the final application keeps traffic to a minimum. As we are all sharing the same frequencies (also with telecom operators like KPN), you should optimize your application regardless of the provider you choose.
- The fair use policy is based on the amount of devices we want to support on each gateway. You don’t have to worry about the backend, it will be able to scale as traffic increases.
- Everything counts. Each uplink counts towards the total uplink, and each downlink (including ACKs) counts towards the total downlink. We recommend to avoid downlink (and therefore also confirmed uplink) as much as possible.
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…but you don’t know which was lost: the uplink or the downlink?
If the uplink was never received by any gateway, it cannot count against the fair use policy as TTN would simply not know you tried to send something.
If the downlink was lost, TTN would not know that it was lost, so it would surely count both the uplink it received and the downlink it sent.
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Regarding the 5% receive duty cycle on the gateway dictated by TTN, what is the official stance of the LoRaWAN alliance on a receive duty cycle for gateways?
I can’t imagine they accept a 100% receive duty cycle on the gateway, yet I can’t find any reference by them regarding such a limitation.
This 5% is just an assumption that was used to define the fair access policy, it’s not an actual limitation.