we’re a small municipal administration that would like to install various gateways on our territory. We would like to do this to enable our citizens to use TTN for their projects without having to install their own gateways.
As we would invest some effort to realize this and didn’t find the information how TTN “categorizes” municipalities (in sense of if these are maybe seen as “commercial” users) I hope someone could give us some answers on this questions. Unfortunately we weren’t able to answer these by searching this forum.
Is an administration allowed to offer gateways to a local community even if the citizens are going to use TTN for commercial use cases? It is clear to us, that commercial use needs to use LoRaWAN Network Server | The Things Stack but as we can’t even say who the users are we can’t make sure they don’t use it for commercial purpose.
Is an administration allowed to use TTN (so called “The Things Stack Sandbox”) for own projects that offer service to the public community of a town (like offering a dashboard to see where parking lots are free or to check if a waste bin is full to empty that bin earlier than normally)?
As this maybe interests also other municipalities that also don’t have a larger budget: is an administration / public government for TheThingsIndustries a “commercial user” and needs therefore a TheThingsStack subscription?
I hope that someone could help us to answer these questions, thanks in advance for all your help.
Just another users thoughts, but someone that knows a little of what it takes to keep the TTN lights on:
It’s mostly based on a sense of fair play. So let’s look at some scenarios:
The municipality collects air quality statistics using 30 devices with the aim to encourage a reduction in driving, particularly around schools - feels good to me
The local growers put some flood warning sensors on local rivers so they can keep their crops safe - and why not!
The refuse collection service deploy smart bins and save €25,000 over three years via cost reduction on personnel & trips to empty them - not so fair that a company in Amsterdam is funding this.
The parking dashboard helps tune the pricing model and saves everyone in the area time & petrol to find a place - that’s their local taxes in action, so why should it be funded by a Dutch company?
Local businesses try to wire their shop security alarms to alert them at home - apart from it not being a good use of LoRaWAN which is not quaranteed to get the message through quickly, that’s them getting a benefit off the back off a company in Amsterdam. Whereas a team of students in the local secondary school can be guided to create a local service that provides the hardware and some of the subscription goes to pay for the TTI use.
and so on.
If ANY of what the municipality hopes to do is in any way cost reducing, income generating or requires some level of service, then the sandbox is not for you.
There is no reason why you can’t have an educational program with gateways on TTN where the community users do their own thing via TTN - please share the gateway console so they can see what is happening - but you fund a TTI instance for your use and maybe charge business users for their commercial deployments.
Larger budget than who? This is a common excuse but the reality is that even a small town’s budget is far far greater than the amount TTN costs to run. So if you honestly can’t afford €2 a year for a device, where will you get the money to buy the devices and the gateways?
But if you participate in this community, you’ll get 10’s of thousands of Euro’s worth of free advice for good projects - some of which will save you 10’s of thousands of Euro’s on hardware as you can solicit advise on the best hardware price/performance ratio and any deals that are around. And as you are close enough to some great wine territory, maybe I’ll come & help in person
Finally, with the greatest of love & respect, would it not be better to think in terms of what you can do with the tech first to make your citizen’s lives better or keep local taxes down before looking at ways to justify using TTN services for free?
Let’s hear what you want to do with it first, then we can help make that an affordable reality for everyone.
Hello and thanks a lot for your thoughts on this topic.
I think I’ve got your point and your examples make sense. Only for the sake of completeness I would like to say that we do not want to charge business users as the project shall simply provide benefits to all people on our territory.
I now understand that a business user has to use the “TheThingsStack” because of commercial use - so we can provide the gateways for everyone and then the single user has to choose his “agreement” with The Things Industries (free use for privates / commercial use for business).
It’s true that the budget question has to be seen as you said and surly if The Things Industries sees municipalities as a “commercial user” the costs are here to pay. I even agree with your thought about the fact, that a municipality must want the best for its inhabitants and the “costs come later”.
However the situation is a bit different for public administrations like ours: Lets say we’re going to use about 100 sensors (that number probably is even a bit high in our situation, but let’s use it). In this case the cost for every sensor in one year is about 20 Euros and not only 2 Euro a year. Because of local laws when a contract is signed to use TheThingsStack we can’t easily pay our debts by credit card and have to check if there exist other products that have to be considered before signing a contract.
The budget question therefore was maybe a bit clumsy but I thought that maybe other municipalities could find this topic in the future an find an answer on this point.
But as said: I get your point and the whole previous paragraph should only describe our situation - its not an attempt to find an excuse to not pay our debts . I also agree with you that we already get a lot of information and ideas here in the community and this surly is a big advantage for us - so we also take this in consideration.
At the moment we only would start with <10 sensors as I personally have already some experience with TTN because of private projects. Therefore our first attempt is to find some stock of affordable sensors that can be used to show the possibilities of these sensors to the stakeholders that afterwards decide where such sensors should be installed.
Actually I can think of:
temperature and humidity sensors inside of rooms that already have an other temperature control (to get an idea if the choosen sensorplatform returns reliable data).
first tries in checking if 1 or 2 waste bins are full or not. Also here the first steps are to install the sensors and get some real world data if everything works as expected.
This said I think the first step is to play a bit with the “sandbox” and then register our sensors using the “Discovery” Plan at TheThingsStack because of the possibility to upgrade later to the “Standard” subscription. If the project later on should not get an acceptance from the stakeholders we can leave the gateway active to the community without a problem - otherwise we upgrade the subscription .
I think in this way we would not use TTN in an unauthorised manner and firstly open our gateway to everyone wanting to use TTN?
There are many such local councils and municipalities and local gov orgs around the world using and contributing to the TTN build out and with their own deployments, community and commercial mixed use.
As an example of good practice I would call out the Reading/Berkshire deployment here in the UK. The SmartBerks team have deployed a few hundred GW’s in the area - effectively overlaid and adjacent to existing TTN Community deployments. The good thing being they have then peered their own TTI instance via PacketBroker to allow for community use and to add redundancy to the existing and adjacent community deployments. As the GW’s are then ‘open’ for community use we can piggy back off them for our own use cases, and at the same time the hundreds of TTN GW’s in the area are also available to the council for their traffic. e.g. I have a sensor monitoring a vulnerable property to the north of their deployments and when (several times) my own GW has gone down (thanks Vodafone!) theirs has been in close enough proximity that my traffic is still captured and passed through their GW and PacketBroker to TTN where I and end user can see it. Similarly one of their GW’s is currently offline and has been down since late Sept waiting for contractor to be assigned fix task, but local traffic is being taken care of by a combination of their own other local GW’s and a few of mine in North Berks and just over the boundary (across the River Thames) in South Buckinghamshire… mutual support for the win!
The worst situation is when councils and municipalities deploy own TTI instance and peer with TTN but only take traffic (using community GW’s) and don’t allow reciprocal connections (please dont do that!), sadly a number of commerical companies do that by default
Everyone and anyone can make use of TTN Sandbox to try things out and see how it goes. That’s what it’s for. So full steam ahead!
Most of what I wrote is about where the project takes you when your use becomes too much for TTN. So it’s a good idea to tell your colleagues now so they aren’t surprised when you say to them that there is a charge coming up.
And yeah, the calculations per device are a bit off for less than 1,000, but it’s pay per use after that, so if you find a number of good use cases you’ll probably exceed that in a year or so. And even at €20 a year, that’s not so bad in a transition phase. If you have 10 different applications on TTN with half-a-dozen sensors to prove a use case, suddenly finding yourself with a few hundred sensors to deploy is quite usual.
As to not charging your business users, that’s a policy decision - is the extra service they get part of their local taxes or an add-on that is very inexpensive because of the core investment made from their local taxes. I see that varying depending on what it is that they get but it’s all down to your community. The only thing I’d say is that business users won’t appreciate the value if it’s given for free but on the flip side, if you charge, they expect service!
I’m well aware of the intricacies of local authority purchasing, spend levels, supplier comparison and so forth - I’m not here to sell you TTI - all of that is the domain of your legal team - if you can find an alternative solution that fits your needs then that’s up to you although my understanding is that most services are of a similar price point but many have higher minimums. And the benefits of TTI is that you can tap in to the community here, whereas challenges you face if you are using another provider aren’t up for discussion - this being a free service funded by TTI after all!
The only philosophical point I’d push back on is “if The Things Industries sees municipalities as a commercial user”. Local government is not commercial but it is a trading entity with substantial income far greater than TTI in most instances and the idea of IoT is to provide a return on investment, sometimes hard cash, sometimes in improved services. It’s not so much if you are commercial as if you benefit it from the service or need to use a disproportionate amount of the resources on offer.
How long would TTN last if only a hundredth of the municipalities in the EU alone decided to deploy just 100 devices each?
The total clarity, what @Jeff-UK is saying here is that gateways are either deployed on TTN (preferable if you wish to give read-only access to community users for debugging their projects) or are on TTI with peering left turned on.
For their device deployment, they use a TTI instance.
Additionally, occasionally actual business use TTN because they are a startup that’s not in profit but it transpires they are charging their customers per device. This isn’t playing nicely either. Or even just having a large number of devices for the benefit of their own business!
thanks a lot for all your responses!
Now I’ve got a better overview and when our project comes to an other point that is larger than the sandbox use I’m going to talk again with TTN .
Hi,
Nice to read your ideas!
Maybe reading this can help you: Meet je Stad
Is is a collaboration between municipality, water authority and citizens.
To support initiatives like this, I place extra gateways.
As a water manager I use TTN for water monitoring.
Farmers use it for soil moisture monitoring.
Municipalities use it to reduce water gifts for trees significantly using soil moisture sensors.
Civilians build their own devices to monitor air quality, temperature and more.
Teachers build devices with the children to monitor the environment together, analyse the results and share the results with the municipality.
This and more happens when you stimulate Lora use with gateways!
If I can help you, please let me know!
. I also agree with you that we already get a lot of information and ideas here in the community and this surly is a big advantage for us - so we also take this in consideration.
