On the point of getting “rewarded” and why people are motivated to run community gateways:
What I would like to know more about, is how TTI views the relation between them and the community.
As far as I know, the community part is what kickstarted TheThingsNetwork, with people setting up gateways often out of their own pocket and extending the network that way. On the other hand, just having gateways is not everything, you need servers/storage/computing power/software development for the backend. I can imagine that without TTI TheThingsNetwork would not have existed anymore. Judging from the responses I see here on the forum, it sometimes feels to me like community users are seen as second-rate users of the network / freeloaders (but of course TTI is not responsible for alle comments here)
So things I wonder about:
- How useful is the community part of TheThingsNetwork actually to TTI? for example in term of community gateways? I can imagine that commercial setups with TTI just roll out their own gateways, with verified coverage, while community gateways can come and go, many of them not at particularly good locations.
- What would TTI like to see from the community? What can the community do for TTI? An emphasis on practical applications was mentioned earlier. I think for community applications this could be citizen science sensing projects, like measuring air quality (particulate matter), environmental noise, etc. I love to help with that (already doing stuff like that).
Personally, and in practical terms, thing I would like to see for the community gateways:
- A kind of notification system, so when a gateway goes down I get notified and can do something about it quickly.
- Get the gateway map back up in a more useful state, e.g. make it display the owner (if made public) so people can more easily contact the gateway owner. For coverage, I’m actually using ttnmapper.org
- In general, I’m just very curious about how “useful” the gateways I administer are. For example, is it passing actual useful traffic, or is it mostly redundant with other gateways? How much of the traffic is peered with other networks? Where are the bottlenecks / gaps?