But they are offering it for free, that’s why you can set up your gateway and you are in, right?
The pricing is for professional support and your own servers.
If you take customers money and there’s a problem, they will expect it to be sorted quickly. If they find out you were using a free resource, they may not be happy.
Not on TTN.
The Things Network (TTN), thethingsnetwork.org, is the free community network, that’s mainly operated by TTI on best effort, but is seeing some ongoing issues on status.thethings.network and has seen some long outages outside office hours. You may get support from volunteers, like on this forum, but they cannot access the network servers to analyze or fix anything.
The Things Industries (TTI), thethingsindustries.com, offers support you may need for a business, is running a more recent version of their LoRaWAN Stack, and shows no current problems on status.thethings.industries.
When all started the idea for TTN was to build a worldwide free network together, but so far it has mainly been TTI that operates TTN. Obviously, they cannot offer everything for free.
I’m sure TTI will gladly provide some paid help. Here on TTN you’ll need to do some reading yourself first, and ask more specific questions. Did you see the documentation and LoRaWAN Academy?
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Blockquote The Things Network (TTN), thethingsnetwork.org, is the free community network, that’s mainly operated by TTI on best effort, but is seeing some ongoing issues on status.thethings.network and has seen some long outages outside office hours. You may get support from volunteers, like on this forum, but they cannot access the network servers to analyze or fix anything.
Yes, I understand that from the server point but they are still using the community gateways aren’t they?
Blockquote I’m sure TTI will gladly provide some paid help. Here on TTN you’ll need to do some reading yourself first, and ask more specific questions. Did you see the documentation and LoRaWAN Academy?
I am taking a look at them right now but as the field is completely new to me I am struggling a bit to understand everything.
Blockquote If you take customers money and there’s a problem, they will expect it to be sorted quickly. If they find out you were using a free resource, they may not be happy.
It wouldn’t be so critical because the use case doesn’t have critical dependency on the servers.
No, at present gateways can really only practically work with one server, as a server (unfortunately) assumes exclusive ownership over any gateways that give it packets.
So if you have a network built around a server other than TTN (even if it’s just a private instance of a newer version of the same software), it has to have its own gateways, too.
If I understand today’s easter egg correctly, then it seems TTN V2 traffic is forwarded to TTI, as per Packet Broker TTN to TTI ttn-v2-eu? But I think TTI might also have TTI-only gateways? (Maybe even gateways for a single customer?)
So if comms goes down for an extended period, or the gateway(s) near your customers nodes are shut down (for what ever reason, there is no compulsion to keep one online), that would be OK?
Follow the links and you will be enlightened …
Strange product then, any details on what it is exactly ?
Cant say I would be keen to buy a product that as a consumer I take the risk of it never working.
So if comms goes down for an extended period, or the gateway(s) near your customers nodes are shut down (for what ever reason, there is no compulsion to keep one online), that would be OK?
Well as i understand they are not offering anything but the technical support so if the gateways are down they wouldn’t be able to do anything for that, right? otherwise they have a parallel working network for products
Strange product then, any details on what it is exactly ?
Cant say I would be keen to buy a product that as a consumer I take the risk of it never working.
It’s a tracking node which doesn’t require knowing the location that often
But presuambly the customers would want to know fairly quickly if the ‘tracker’ stopped working or was stolen\missing ?
But presuambly the customers would want to know fairly quickly if the ‘tracker’ stopped working or was stolen\missing ?
Yea that’s the point even with a subscription I wouldn’t be able to detect them if the community gateways are off
If you subscribe to a TTI product, they provide you with the backend infrastructure and, optionally at the entry level, a support desk contact. They rather expect you to provide the gateway coverage, which to be clear, is YOU buying gateways, deploying them, powering them, hugging them etc. Gateways are relatively dumb boxes which a degree of overlap in coverage will be resilient - but you’ll need those backend servers to be available 99.999% of the time which is where TTI come in.
Put a small node close to each gateway that transmits a small payload once every couple of minutes, then you get 2.5 minutes heads up that a gateway is down.
I like how the concentrator under my pillow keeps it nice and warm
In all seriousness, I’d recommend anyone deploying gateways set up a remote administration solution (ssh reverse tunnel to bastion host or a vpn) for the gateway operating systems - gateway backend protocols are about data and at most trivial management, administering the field deployed embedded computers is another manner.
So what i undestand its not reliable unless i am installing my own gateways and make sure they are working… thats a lot of cost
Yes, the Gateways will cost you, but you are a commercial operation, so is it reasonable for someone else to pay for the communications your business needs ?
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Yes, the Gateways will cost you, but this is a commercial operation, so is it reasonable for someone else to pay for the communications your business needs.
Yes right but if the community will have access to them they could be down as well, so it’s still not a reliable solution. Actually I heard about companies offering servers for commercial use
That would still require gateways to get data from the air to those servers. Or you try Orange/SwissCom/KPN/Whichever provider offers LoRaWAN commercially in your target country/countries.
By the way, welcome to the world of the community spending THEIR money so YOU can develop commercial offerings.
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It not really a question of relaibilty, but one of who is accountable when it does not work.
If your selling a commercial service, you should not rely on volunteers and free to use community services as part of the business plan.
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That’s tough, because part of the way something like TTN possibly really works is that commercial users who need coverage build it out - and then hopefully share it in return for getting some chance of coverage in places where they haven’t built something out.
What’s not sufficiently developed are the mechanisms where people with such a need can manage all of the critical pieces to the satisfaction of their requirement, while also sharing the installation with the community.
Possibly there’s some progress with TTI-contracted private installs gaining ability to interchange with the public network. In the general case though, people who have a funded need end up building entirely private networks and interchange with TTN happens at the level of sharing only knowledge, not signals or packets or coverage.
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