I suspect that you have something like a “right to repair” view.
I have spent 35+ years (I’m semi-retired now) working on critical systems for offshore Oil & Gas which has a “must not modify” approach policed by organisations like Lloyd’s Register and DNV. The only modifications allowed are those from the supplier done via full Engineering Change Management (ECM). O&G companies, of course, only purchase critical systems from suppliers who will put the appropriate service levels behind their products.
As @kersing rightly says, one of the strengths of LoRaWAN is that we have choices. Suppliers also, of course, are free to choose how they offer products into the marketplace and we are free to choose how we spend our money.
“must not modify” has its place in certain highly regulated settings, but is about assigning responsibility, not about getting things to work.
It is also how you get gear with known quirks which the people in the field build a culture of working around… eg soldiers told they have to power cycle a system every 8 hours, because after that a software bug leads to growing imprecision.
Returning to the realm of a LoRaWAN network, the “interesting” stuff which really governs behavior is in the nodes and the network server. All the gateway really needs to do is pass things back and forth, keep doing that, report to its owners about its ability to keep doing that, let them remotely deploy updates into it, etc. There’s no real business value in a gateway, only liability when it fails to do its simple job.
We get downtime from novel problems, but then we figure out what happened and fix things so it can’t again, or at worst add instrumentation so the next time it happens we’ll collect enough information to understand and fix the problem.
The place we continue to suffer repeating downtime incidents from the same known problems is in the systems we don’t have access to fix.
Any new developments on this topic? I’m also looking for compact LTE gateways.
Dragino warns that they are not for LoRaWan use, e.g: LG308 Indoor LoRaWAN Gateway
Will they work with TTN?
Note: Somehow I cannot seem to post new topics so I’m hijacking this one - not sure why
Look at MikroTik offerings. Check the announced partnering of TTI with T-Mobile during the virtual TTN conference last January. Videos should be on TTN YouTube channel.
The MikroTik LtAP is an amazing bit of Kit and sits idle witnh a load of around 4 watts.
I’m using a 50 watt solar panel, 10Amp MPPT charger and a 71Ah12V battery which gives me (almost) 24x7 power.
A 100w panel gives me year round operation