Hello,
the more you get in the topic, the more questions come up…
What can be done if the neighbor sends every 2 seconds in SF12 on all channels?
What happens when the frequencies are full / overloaded?
Can someone locate and contact someone?
Is it possible to isolate a node so that it is no longer recognized?
Is it currently working just because everyone voluntarily adheres to it?
The questions I ask myself therefore:
Should a city provide connectivity for parking, garbage and more through TTN, or should it build its own network?
Unless private networks use a different frequency plan, everyone is sharing the same radio spectrum. So adding gateways to a shared network such as TTN is better, as then more nodes will have a gateway close by and can decrease their transmission power.
In my City (Freiburg in Germany) we have at least 3 LoRaWAN Networks. A private called I-NOVA by our local energy provider (Badenova) used for industrial applications with high security/availability backend, a public TTN Network also sponsored with Gateways (Lorix One) by Badenova and many other users and last but not least another commercial/public network called LORIOT. All using the same frequency plan and hear each other. I see in my TTN console of my gateway packages from the other networks as well as from TTN.
In Germany we have the “Bundesnetzagentur” which is the authority to report violation of the frequency plan. In theory they will come and locate the node and stops the sending, but i’m not sure if it is so, i don’t have seen any case for that. In the past they came and closes some amateur radio sender or cordless phones when they disturbing local television. But that was the good old time with CRT TV.
If “more” is something more or less “life critical” then better use something other than LoRaWAN and other ISM band wireless technologies. For instance, with LoRaWAN (EU868) you can easily block RX2 with a dozen of LoRa modules still being a good citizen; so I’m not sure it is good idea to use LoRaWAN for street lights, and so on…
Yes it is unrealible by design but in the last 8 month, since my gateway and some nodes are running, it happens much ofter that the TTN Backend has a problem (my monitoring alerts me) than a packet from a node is not received by the gateway. I can live with this sometimes instable backend, my use cases working anyway, but i guess in a industrial environment it is necessary that you need a stable running backend on that you can trust it is working.
Hello my friend, I’m from Gelsenkirchen from the Ruhr area
Yes, I have that feeling too. In these cases, I would connect the gateways with TTN Broker, but at the same time to its own? So you are not dependent on TTN? Is that possible?
We will use LoRaWAN for Smart City, but we also want to support the community.
It would be more for sensor values. So trash can, air quality, parking …
The long range is actually also a disadvantage of LoRa. Why? Because when you have a receiver which receives in a 2 km area, if you put a lot ot sensors there, let’s see, if you put more than 2,000 sensors in this range of the transmitter, they almost cannot connect to the gateway because everyone attempts to talk and jumps with somebody else who also wants to talk. So this is one of the problems with LoRa.
In Plovdiv we don’t have this problem. But in Sofia there are a lot of people who try to implement LoRa solutions. And, you know, they work on the license free frequency. But “license free”, this doesn’t mean that this frequency is yours. If you want to follow the standard, you should not talk more than 1% of the time. Nobody complies with this. They just talk until the gateway confirms that it received the message. And they make it impossible for other people to follow the standard.
So I had a customer last week and they said “show me where this LoRa works, because we tried in Sofia and it doesn’t work”. I said, yeah, here in Plovdiv it still works, because there are not so many users who do not follow the standard and just emit content, maximum possible distance, the longest messages they can do, and don’t care about the others.
Of course, the following map only shows TTN gateways, but: I wonder if the above can be mitigated by installing more gateways, to decrease the cell size along with ADR:
I watched/listen to that presentation also and thought much the same - per my comment in the linked thread many focus on just doing nodes and forget to add to the pool of GW’s. Also the map is typical of TTN deployments in that # of GW’s could be increased 40% if the offline GW’s were left on/connected
With brilliant sense of timing typing this just interrupted by UPS Guy delivering YALG* for me…#26/27 here we come
I would think that more gateways and working ADR would go a long way towards solving this problem. Of course spectrum expansion would also help. Right now LoRa has a very small space to work within.
Interesting case from Germany: A non-TTN node was sending every 6 seconds with SF12 and effectively blocking the nearest gateway. OTAA was nearly impossible.
The affected person contacted the Bundesnetzagentur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency) who is responsible for radio frequency violations and they quickly responded with a local investigation and found the rogue node after approx. 1.5h of search. They are now investigating if this is illegal in Germany (the local investigators did not hear of LoRa up to date point) and the user tried to reduce the sending frequency (he probably did not know what he was doing).
Now imagine that some nodes continiously transmit just LoRa preamble. You’ll see no uplinks from other networks in this case, and you gateway will be effectively blocked. Are you going to ask the GeheimStaatSpaceMarines to come and rescue you every time when you encounter “no uplinks in TTN console” trouble?
A non-TTN node was sending every 6 seconds with SF12 and effectively blocking the nearest gateway. OTAA was nearly impossible.
It shouldn’t - unless your scheme only supports one frequency, or unless that node is using the same frequency selection plan you are, and you spend periods of timing being synchronized in your execution of such.
Now imagine that some nodes continiously transmit just LoRa preamble.
That would probably be illegal in most places.
First, you generally aren’t allowed to transmit narrow bandwidth signals continuously. Maybe you mean “frequently”
You’ll see no uplinks from other networks in this case, and you gateway will be effectively blocked.
Not really. One pre-amble sender would only hit one frequency and spreading factor. A gateway not close enough to be swamped outright or picking up the skirts of the signal should be able to receive on the other channels and even the other spreading factors of that channel.
Are you going to ask the GeheimStaatSpaceMarines to come and rescue you
In most places it is illegal to intentionally interfere. A system just playing “made you look!” with LoRa demodulator slices by sending preambles but never following with any data would likely be hard to defend as anything other than an intentional interferer.
