I was looking at the TTN gateway map here in the USA, and frankly, a tad depressing for someone thinking of doing IoT products
For instance, go look at Western NY state. I have family in Rochester, and there is nothing for 50-60 miles. Heck, look at Long Island NY - an area with MILLIONS of people, and no gateways. Heck, South Dakota doesn’t show ANY gateways, WY, NV show ONE each (and NV is right on the border of CA)
As an IoT vendor, how would you deal with this?
Buy lots of low cost GW’s (TTIG’s, LPS8’s etc.) and give then m to family and freinds in the areas you want to cover 
Find worthwhile causes and give them there, looks to where you want to deploy your IoT nodes and do targeted deployments in that area…often end users want the node function and benefit & dnt care what is physically deployed so e.g. if looking to cover a hotel for T&H, water leaks etc. stick in a local GW, youth hostel?, same, school?, same, student halls of residence?, same, business park or universit campus estates management?, same… network quickly builds… Amortising a $70-$240 GW over a dozen node or more soon falls into a low cost activity…and once GW’s are deployed additional nodes start to join ‘free’ (well for the cost of node and deployment effort )
What you are seeing in USA State level is smaller scale version of what happens at continental level, which is a mrror of what happens at global level…patchy coverage with some area well saturated (Think Zurich, Amsterdam, London, etc.) whist other areas are sparcely covered. The trick is to not think in terms of solving world hunger, boiling oceans or covering the globe/N.America/USA/New York State/S.Dakota or whatever with GW’s, but rather focus on covering one smaller region that motivates you, friends, community collaborators or clients…and slowly it grows…
So, to satisfy my curiosity, what do you use for IOT in the USA ?
The issue is I worry selling the product. Say I sell a bunch of Temp/Humidity sensors - We sell them for say $125 (industrial grade stuff) - having the customer have to buy another $65-100 gateway is a big hit
A lot of our sensors are out on farms, monitoring water quality etc. I guess we can figure this out
So, not an industrial grade gateway - a bit of a contradiction.
But a farm with a good gateway well placed could service 1,000 nodes without breaking sweat, thereby reducing it’s cost per device per year to pennies on the dollar.
Hi @KG2V, I am involved in deploying LoRaWAN sensors and gateways on farms in Scotland, together with the data processing systems. The farmers here have exactly zero interest in sensors and gateways. The farmers here are very interested in the data and how it can reduce costs, reduce risks and increase income.
The early use-cases that we are deploying for commercially are things like:
Farmers here live on their mobiles because they spend so much time away from the office. Everything that we do is presented to them via our own mobile app. We have invested more in the mobile app than in the sensors and infrastructure.
I would advise you to sell at the informed decision-making, risk-reduction, cost-reduction, etc. level. If we tried to sell sensors to farmers we would fail.
Sensors on a farm are what Teralytic does, specifically big probes down into the soil. They often put in their own gateways but I think sometimes buy service from a commercial provider if there is one with coverage.
Really once you’re deploying several sensors, have another gateway that is comparable in price (or more realistically, the price of 3-4 sensors) isn’t a big deal.
One of the things it’s easy to forget about in a connected age is that the US is really huge, and in much of the area there isn’t much in the way of active human presence. Consider the mention of Rochester, NY - in a way, that’s “right in the backyard” of all the activity at Ithaca that’s grown up as a result of MCCI’s presence there (very nearly, if not the most TTN activity anywhere in the US…) But in reality, it’s almost 100 miles form Rochester to Ithaca.
“So, to satisfy my curiosity, what do you use for IOT in the USA ?”
We are a sensors company - we have clients asking for LoRa. What are THEY going to use it for? Not a real clue, whatever they want. Most of our customers are industrial (where I expect they will use our WiFi stuff), but we have folks out monitoring stuff outside.
They may not really know either, but just have seen a marketing blurb aimed at the business rather than technical side.
For example, do they even know enough to be clear if they are asking for LoRaWAN? Or it is just “I heard about the LoRa stuff…”
Realistically if you want to use these technologies for an actual revenue generating application which expects results, you need to budget for gateways.
"So, not an industrial grade gateway - a bit of a contradiction.
But a farm with a good gateway well placed could service 1,000 nodes without breaking sweat, thereby reducing it’s cost per device per year to pennies on the dollar."
Yeah, I’m price sensitive, probably a LOT more than the customer, or my employer. I shudder when I have to buy another feather, and my employer buys 10 for me.
It probably isn’t an issue. When I say industrial grade sensors - totally IP67, high accuracy etc. I don’t know what the final price would be, but I seem to worry a lot more than the company does.
You know what is a big selling item? A multi hundred dollar pool monitoring kit (wifi) - I get it, but I don’t get it
The product isn’t really the data monitoring for us - it is a way to sell sensors. It is what we do
I think we are seeing the disconnect between technical & commercial.
People only buy things to solve a problem - a Rolex to show how rich they are, a soil moisture sensor so they don’t have to traipse 5 miles down the road to check a field.
Sell them solutions to problems.
To reinforce my message, people don’t buy sensors, they buy knowledge, it’s just they have to buy a sensor to get that knowledge.
Frankly, you appear to be sitting on a bit of an untapped market - turn your sensors in to a solution and please send me the royalties.
How are you going to build a product that works if you don’t understand its role in the system?
I mean, if you really want to take the protocol-ignorant way out of it you can buy a LoRaWAN stack in a module with its own processor.
But likely to have something that’s actually useful you’re going to have to create a platform where the customer can work on the firmware.
Coming up with your own firmware that will work without customer tweaking would require first gaining a HUGE depth of awareness of how LoRaWAN (or any other protocol you chose to run over LoRa) really works in the real world.
" Consider the mention of Rochester, NY - in a way, that’s “right in the backyard” of all the activity at Ithaca that’s grown up as a result of MCCI’s presence there (very nearly, if not the most TTN activity anywhere in the US…) But in reality, it’s almost 100 miles form Rochester to Ithaca."
Yep, well aware of that distance. From Rochester, it is nearly Buffalo or Syracuse for nodes
I’m probably worrying too much, my employer is like “$400 for a node? No big deal” Heck, he is thinking we’ll throw one on the roof just to test with!! (I shudder inside)
My problem (and my employer teases me about this) is that I don’t draw a distinction between “Company Money” and “Person Money” - You know “Gee, $500 to get temp and humidity etc is BLEEPING a lot of $$$” and “Gee, that is less than the cost of what we’ll save the first month”
That would actually be a very good plan, if you spent the money on a gateway.
Nodes, at least in terms of grafting a LoRaWAN solution onto some sensor product you already make and have “not suitable for customer use” beat up examples of kicking around the lab are not going to cost much at all in terms of hardware, but only your time.
" That would actually be a very good plan, if you spent the money on a gateway ."
That’s what I meant, my bad.
Like I said, we are mostly in the sensor market, and we basically sell “We have ways to measure water quality plus certain air quality, to levels that are usually lab”
I’d say well more than 1/2 our sales are to people integrating them into their own products.
My side? I developed a simple RPi product to read and display the data, plus send it to MQTT
Now they want me to develop remote sensors to send to MQTT/Our RPi display. TTN? Maybe. Private network? Maybe Receiver that has I2C and ‘looks’ like our sensor? (The RPi is doing it all I2C bus, but the sensors can also do serial) That is probably one of the big goals
Me? I just have to test these, and get some of them working. I have data going from a feather, to a feather, and being displayed (But not I2C).
I think TTN might be a great way, because it is there. I’m seriously considering LoRA (without the WAN) but my personal “OMG Money” (Like I said, I PERSONALLY hate the $$) makes me not really like the idea of 2 feathers.
I’d say half the problem is ME, as an employee not wanting to spend $$ - I know the boss isn’t afraid of it, but I get antsy
That’s not how it works. You’d get your feed from the network server by a network-style connection, eg, you’d subscribe to the MQTT broker where it pushes traffic, or have some restful integration or whatever. Even if you were running all the infrastructure pieces on a box with no external network connection, they’d still interact via network protocols on the loopback interface.
In the node you might be able to use I2C to talk to an embedded LoRaWAN stack, a few may offer that as an option. Most however use AT style commands over a UART.
You missed the idea of say we use another feather for a receiver, drop off the TTN, go pure LoRa (vs WAN) . We pair a probe and receiver. The probe transmits ever X time. The receiver gets the data, and stores it in memory.
My program which reads my existing sensors sees the “receiver feather” on the I2C bus, and asks “Give me the latest reading” (it doesn’t care how old it is - we have ways to deal with it). The receiver gives the latest it has to my program
Yep, requires a receiver per transmitter. Ugly, except that we THINK one of the major markets (product isn’t out yet) will basically be 1:1 anyway. So all local.
It is one of the 3 markets we are thinking about - a true LoRaWan (and I came to the conclusion that a customer having to buy a gateway is no big deal for THAT market) and this “I need longer range than WiFi, but it is one sensor pack, one receiver” is a different market (I was trying to combine the 2)
While the first will almost definitely be LoRaWan (read TTN) the second might be LoRa (not WAN) - aka just communications between two devices (albeit unidirectional)
Sad to report that Teralytic has been out of business for almost a year.