My personal preference is that TTN recognise that SCG’s are being connected to the community network, and integrate a flag into the Gateway Settings / Information so that we can identify them as such. This information should ideally be available via the API, so that developers are able to recognise and handle data coming from SCG’s.
I’m guessing SCG’s will exist for at least 12-18 months until there’s wider LoRaWAN coverage, and after that SCG’s will still be connected to TTN as legacy devices. I’d prefer to see them acknowledged, even if not officially supported.
The main issue with single channel gateways is people adapting their nodes to use that single channel. This means that frequency is be less available for other use. And while there may not be other TTN gateways within reach of such nodes (which makes people use a SCG to provide coverage) there are other LoRaWAN networks around for which there will be an impact. In my opinion TTN community gateways should not be ‘bad neighbors’ or ‘encourage the nodes’ to become bad neighbors. Keep in mind we are all sharing the precious radio spectrum…
A solution to minimize impact would be to use a frequency (at least in EU868 regions) that does not match any of the three required channels. At the moment most SCGs use one of them because that allows ‘regular’ nodes to use them to join (eventually when a request happens to match the frequency the gateway uses).
Did you notice that in fact currently the KPN nodes are the bad neighbors? They probably stay within limits but by average they do use far more airtime than the average TTN node. And that is even without considering things like those Belkin LoRa devices, in that same precious spectrum.
edit: this does not mean that I believe SCG’s are a particularly good idea. It’s just to put things a bit in perspective.
Hi guys! M xmas and happy new year! I have gone through your discussion. I strongly believe that Multiple channels and single channels gateways should co-exist. In urban areas we might need multichannel , in rular areas single channel.
I have seen that practically a single channel can handle 50 nodes…
Questions
what happens in a real situation (within an urban environment) when a 8 channel Lora gateway needs to handle 500-800 devices?
what happens in case this MULTI channel gateway dies? what about redundancy?
What happens with interference provided that 500 -800 devices might co-exist and talk in the same area with the same gateway?
I think that
we can have single channel in TTN (for sure they should have some limitations) + mark them
Single channel gateways are cheaper and you might have more GATEwAYS to cover the same area but at the same time you increase redundacy (you loose 50 instead of 500 nodes)
Reliability? maintenance? Power requirements?
If we cover a city (many services in a smart city) we might theoritically need one 8 channel gateway… but if this one goes down… Houston we have a problem (this might be caused… by hackers… or anything else)
On the other hand we might have a redundacy system…
the future are cheap multichannel gateways with build in BlueTooth imho.
as said many many times before… ss gateways are a great way to learn and experiment, but now the prices for real gateways have come down from 1000 to 100 dollar, the price is no longer an argument for a serious user/company.
* a special single channel ‘lane’ ? I would not 'ban them on the network
agree 100%, as someone who played with single channel gateways it was fine for a bit but in reality very limiting, with the price drops we now have its a no brainer to get a full gateway setup as they are so cheap - the big benefit of getting a real gateway setup is asking people to not just think about their own nodes but to help serve the wider TTN community, whereas single channels gateways are driven by in individuals needs