Emergency Use of The Things Network Which Abuses Fair Access Policy

there will always remain ‘blank spots’ on the map (rural areas) where there’s no LoRaWAN coverage.
you won’t solve that with compensation, also LoRaWAN depends on 'normal internet connections, so if these are not available you’ll need a gateway with a simcard.
also you’ll see activities in LoRaWAN over satellite… maybe that’s the future ?

Hmm, I think if there is cellular coverage in any given region there can be LoRaWAN coverage too, and in fact LoRaWAN may be better suited for rural deployments - also considering there is a lot of potential for asset / food chain management applications on farms, to list just one example, that would be ideal for LoRaWAN.

I suppose one could ask: if there is no coverage because there is no infrastructure, then would any asset worth tracking ever go there?

yes of course… but who installs those sim LoRaWAN gateways in 'blank spot area’s ?
what’s the business model ? maybe big telecoms ?

The same type of folks setting up TTN gateways could be motivated. I don’t know what you have in AU for commercial LoRaWAN network operators, but here in NA there’s a couple like MachineQ and Senet, both of which offer the capability to deploy a gateway to any location to extend coverage for a really modest fee (let’s all agree that LoRaWAN infrastructure is very low cost compared to what we are used to now). If there’s a business case, then it can happen.

Let’s say that business case is several farms in an area want to monitor soil and atmospheric conditions with several sensors each. A solution provider charges the farm operations a monthly fee to acquire the data, scrub it, and make it available to the farm operators in a way that works with their processes. Actionable data. There is value in this. The sensors would be deployed for no cost probably, owned and maintained by the solution provider (I mean, what customer really wants to deal with managing yet another piece of technology?) These farmers just want to get the most and best quality product to market, while minimizing their costs to do it.

The network operator and solution provider share that monthly revenue. There’s the business case.

don’t know… I’m Dutch :sunglasses:

I don’t know what you have in AU for commercial LoRaWAN network operators

Australia’s network is pretty new and in its baby stages. I’d say it is a year or so behind some of the bigger European places with heaps of gateways, so I don’t know of too many LoRaWAN network operators other than small time stuff. There are people out there, but no major company has implemented, nor deployed it over here.

Hypothetically, the idea of an emergency device such as a tracker which only transmits if unusual activity is present would not come into facing fair use policy limits as much as if it was based on transmissions over a longer period of time, say 1 week. Therefore, you could have devices blast a heap off messages in a really short period which is great for tracking, but this could create stress on the network as it is using the airways in one clump rather than spread out.

Is this why the fair use policy is based on a 24 hour period, such that transmission, even though they could be in higher numbers, are spread over a longer and more spaced out period of time?

So at the moment, a device with doesn’t transmit at all for months on end, but exceeds the fair use policy on a single day would be in abuse, even though over that period of time it is utilising less of the network than a device which follows the policy. On the surface it makes sense, but if the intention of the fair use policy is to reduce clogging of the network, it seems to address the issue partially, but on the other hand I don’t know how you could do it any other way.

I’m just throwing another idea on the table.

exactly … I’m about to merge 3 topics that seems to go al in the same direction, ‘how can we bend/stretch the TTN fair use policy’

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