Note: This message was moved here from another thread.
Since we started this entire journey, it has been our goal to create a worldwide LoRaWAN ecosystem. We’ve done this with our public community network, but we also wanted to do this for other public and private networks. That’s why last year we announced Packet Broker.
With Packet Broker, different networks (but also clusters within the same network) can exchange traffic with one another. We call this peering. In this peering relationship, there are two sides:
- The Forwarder: Sends uplinks to Packet Broker, receives downlinks from Packet Broker
- this is basically the gateway side
- The Home Network: Receives uplinks from Packet Broker, sends downlinks to Packet Broker
- this is basically the application side
The Things Stack (v3) can be both a Forwarder and Home Network (at the same time), while our V2 implementation is only a Forwarder. This means that two v3 clusters can have bidirectional peering, while a v2 cluster can only be the “gateway side”.
For the next couple of months it gets a bit confusing, since The Things Network now has both v2 clusters and v3 clusters. Between the different v2 clusters, there is full bidirectional traffic exchange (although that has always been a bit flaky). Between the different v3 clusters, there is full bidirectional peering through Packet Broker. You can have your gateways on v2 and your applications on v3. But you can not have your applications on v2 if your gateways are on v3.