What type of gateway are people using for their LoRaWAN network? We are experiencing quite a lot of connection dropouts with our LTE backhaul on our WisGate Edge Lite (RAK7268) from RAKWireless, and I’m interested to hear what other alternatives are out there?
We are also using WisDM for managing our Gateway fleet. Do you know of any good alternatives for this?
Thanks a lot in advance!
multiteck
Given that TTN is one of the oldest LoRaWAN networks and has provided free access since it’s inception, it is likely that every possible make & model of gateway has been used by someone, 99% of them not frequenting the forum.
And as I said on Slack, the chipsets all come from Semtech and it’s a seriously non-trivial task to spin a PCB to make a concentrator so any established vendor is, on balance, going to be providing a working design.
You appear to be assuming that there is something wrong with the RAK product, which on an individual unit level may be the case. But overall they ship a lot of product and have been doing it for a while, so I think you should revisit your assumption and look at the element that comes up often enough on the forum, the mobile backhaul.
You can check the gateway by putting it on Ethernet. AFAIK WisDM is only for remote management but you can turn that off to take it out of the equation. You can check the LTE by moving location by a few km and then change the service provider.
And/or you could purchase a totally different brand of gateway that has LTE and try that - Dragino is from the Far East but seems to be in widespread use, if you want to try a European based product (which doesn’t mean it wasn’t made else where), then there are Mikrotik units with a substantially different underlying OS.
until you have 500+ gateways, they only you realize the difference in them
Thank you, Nick! You are right, I’m somewhat assuming there’s a problem with the mobile backhaul of the RAK product, since the cellular connection is where we are having problems (not the LoRa part). This is why I’m interested in hearing other peoples experience and potential solutions to similar problems with either RAK products or other gateways connected through LTE.
Previously RAKWireless did agree they had a firmware bug related to this, however they claim it should be solved by now with the latest firmware, but we are still experiencing same issue.
Regarding the WisDM part of my question, it was mainly to get an idea of what other similar platforms are out there, since WisDM is not solving all of our problems while being a fairly costly service. And yes it is only for remote management, which we have found ourselves in need of, because of the problems with connection. Furthermore I’m not a huge fan of the vendor lock-in of using a platform like WisDM that’s only supporting their own products.
Dragino and Mikrotik might be good alternatives to RAK. We will try and look into them. Thanks a lot!
TLDR; The LoRa part works fine. Mobile backhaul is the problem. Wanted to hear about alternatives to RAK and WisDM.
Dragino have code for a reverse proxy to allow you to ssh in to a gateway - it will be a bit messy to scale but worth a look.
Perhaps the gateway master, @Jeff-UK, could comment.