If i had a friend, and he would be willing to install a LoRaWAN gateway in a “strategical interesting point”, he probably will ask me “How much data throughput will be there if the gateway is running on its maximum?”.
Can anybody answer this question, adding some calculations? Pls: kilobyte/hour
Thank you!
Just some references from Slack, yesterday:
@mellbratt [11:02 PM]
So. I’m planning to run a gateway off 3G/4G. Does anyone know/have experience with how much data I need per month?
@bastiaanv [11:28 PM]
Ive read figures around 200MB
the real answer is off-course: “it depends”…
@shiv [11:54 PM]
I think even if the gateway is not ‘busy’ with your nodes, there could be other nodes from someone else that the gateway picks up and forwards. So you’ll need to account for this too.
…
@RichL [9:16 AM]
you will need around 500MB/month for GW status messages etc. So I would suggest that 1-2GB/mth would be a good start
Just some more numbers from another topic:
And some more from Slack today, emphasis mine:
@jpmeijers [2:17 PM]
I heard rumours that some people have 1GB/month and that that is enough.
I however have no data to prove it.
@proffalken [2:25 PM]
I’ve had a gateway up and running for about a month now, and it’s sent back around 210MB of data. That includes the resin.io data channels and call outs to TTN for a single temperature sensor sending data every 30 seconds.
I suspect that most of that traffic is resin, but I don’t have the granularity on the network monitoring yet to be confident
@jpmeijers [2:27 PM]
That sounds like you are using the new packet forwarder, which uses protocol buffers. Much more lightweight than the old udp packet forwarder.
@proffalken [2:33 PM]
yup, that’s the one
And from another topic:
For those who are interested; This is the data on a per day basis that is being registered by the router of our gateway de Mheen in Apeldoorn. Maximum is 8 MByte per day.
And meanwhile 10 MB 
hmm… really? 10MB/Day? With an average datalength of 35 bytes this would mean 285714 msg/day. divided by 86400 seconds aday has makes 3.3 msg/second.So your console gateway traffic page must fill up faster than you can read it…
Even with NO payload you get some Traffic. And every Packet adds much more Overhead than you have with the payload.
@moeterbin I was assuming an average payload of 20 bytes and therefore an average package datalength of 35 bytes. Is this assumption wrong? What are then realistic values for the msg/second calculation?
The LoRaWAN payload is indeed in the order of bytes, for communication between a device and a gateway. However, when sending data over to The Things Network, a gateway adds metadata (spreading factor, bandwidth, gateway status) and its communication protocol with the network server can create quite some data overhead. For example, when using the Semtech UDP protocol, the data is sent in plaintext/JSON. That also doesn’t include keepalives, data pull messages…
How can I reduce this?
Considering that most of my nodes send ~ 20bytes/day of actual data to the gateway, it’s hard to understand why the gateway needs to send literally 500x that amount.
Since I’m using a cellular backhaul, this ends up being a definite pinch to my wallet too.