They are planning on building a 50 gateway LoRaWAN network covering London which would I believe effectively kill off any TTN activities in central London. The news article has a lot of unanswered questions that hopefully I’ll be able to get answers for later when I speak to them.
This is a commercial venture and I’d expect them to want to make money out of it. They say its free, but for how long? What I do know is that it will be a competitor to TTN and any business looking to use LoRaWAN would prefer to deal with another business rather than a community.
a lot of marketing BS… not a real serious killer app, and that will kill LoRa networks
By connecting data from multiple sensors, including that from pedestrian footfall counts, crash-impact incidents from bike-frame sensors and traffic congestion feeds.
By offering a more cost-effective communication network, service providers delivering environmental quality analysis could access a much richer and more detailed network of multiple sensor data-points across London
Optimising delivery drones: The way in which items are delivered is likely to be transformed over the comings years, thanks to advances in drone technology.
Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. I’m sure there’ll be more networks coming online. With little bandwidth required and gateways costing no more more than “enterprise grade” WiFi counterparts it’s an easy decision.
TTN however is still the open network anyone can join with their own gateways, connect at different points in the chain and use devices across the world.
These are the strong points TTN should capitalize on for creating innovative services and enable experimentation.
Right, but you would expect that to happen sometimes, right? The project is open source, MIT licensed (which I think is great BTW), and as a result easy to modify/fork for exclusive commercial use by some people. It’s not really an if but a when.
I agree with @jmarcelino that more nodes for the TTN network will pop up, especially as prices decrease over time. Besides, gateways don’t need to be super-dense and I think are already at a good point.
To me, what seems to be missing are the sensors and useful ones. Temperature sensors are easy to make, but not all that sexy. I think it would be fun to make some open-hardware sensors for what they mentioned, like foot-fall or entry/exit detection for businesses. A business could buy and install such a sensor cheaply but then be featured somewhere based on how many people there are inside. So people who want to visit a quiet coffee shop can find one, and other who want an active bar can do the same. For dense cities like London with lots of businesses, I think use-cases like that could spur adoption of a network quickly and they’d be happy to do it with TTN.
I’m sure there are other such scenarios using the sensors and would be worth seeing which could be most useful.
Nothing prevent multiple networks to be deployed in one location. Enthusiasts can still deploy their TTN gateway and try to reach a proper coverage.
It could be also possible to have this initiative to ‘share’ access with TTN enabling users of both to share the same infra.
In Paris there is similar initiative submitted to citizens’ vote to have an IoT network. The current thinking would be to use TTN back-end, with potentially a private connected network to ensure the local traffic handled locally for certain applications.
Providing ‘zero cost’ network access has always been the inevitable outcome of technologies such as LoraWan, I’m even a bit amazed it took start-ups this long to generate spin about it. It’s their chance to ‘disrupt’ the telco model with their €c60/month fees.
Truth is this is not zero cost, and it also isn’t any threat to crowd sourced initiatives such as TTN. Catapult is a commercial venture and will develop commercial services for its customers. While you won’t pay for the network access, their customers will pay for things like support, SLA backed back-end services or application development. Ventures like these just shift their revenue from network access to service and application development and hosting - which is, I believe, the only market where there is money to be made with IoT.
And yes, if you develop your own application you can still make use of the free network access they provide, but why should you? You know they will give priority to commercial customers. The open and neutral nature is the strength of TTN: it has a worldwide and active community, you know your packets will be treated on the same best-effort basis as everyone elses and support will be the same for everyone. The only differentiatior could be coverage, but never believe the marketing doublespeak concerning ‘coverage’. LoraWan coverage will always be a local ‘pico’ case, so in most use cases placing an additional gateway where your IoT devices are being used will be the way to go.
Shouldn’t it be part of the license to use ttn software for setting up a private back end that the connected gateways also forward to ttn? Apart from the fact that it’s a bit annoying that commercial parties may use ttn software for their profit without returning anything, the situation could also occur that a commercial party would build a ‘ttn network’, funded by sponsors, and once it’s completed overnight disconnect it from ttn.
Agree with @jmarcelino in that it is the obvious thing to happen, and fundamentally in that it is not a bad thing either.
Here in Zurich, there are already other two LoRaWAN operators (Swisscom & loriot.io) besides our TTN community, and there’s a third coming soon (the postal office).
If anything, that promotes competition. And TTN is as feature-complete as almost all alternatives, so it is a very compelling option because it’s free without strings attached.
any business looking to use LoRaWAN would prefer to deal with another business rather than a community.
That is true. To counter that, we founded a civil association to bridge the community to the corporate world. Without it, there are cases in which we cannot even start talking about a deal. As mentioned in other posts, we’re open sourcing the legal documents to build one of these (at least in Switzerland, but you can surely derive and adapt to other countries).
Overall this is a good thing. The UK is way behind the rest of Europe with no sign of a public network as available in France, Netherlands, Switzerland … Whether or not you believe in public networks, it does have a big impact on local design activity. Take it as a big marketing boost.
This affects not just London as they are looking at rolling this out to other cities. There are a number of concerns that have been voiced by people I have been speaking to, which don’t just relate to TTN
It potentially consolidates BT’s position as far as IoT provision is concerned - BT is not liked too much in some cities due to the ways they aggressively opposed the creation of Free Public WiFi, costing cities millions in legal costs.
Where has the public money come from to launch this network? Why wasn’t this money available as a competitive process - so other cities could bid for it. (This isn’t a TTN issue)
It creates problems especially when we in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield etc are trying to put the case to local authorities that the ttn network is a community asset and offers opportunities that a closed network can’t We are trying to get community libraries to participate - of which we need to go through local authorities. But they are attracted to the bright lights and offerings of Digital Catapult
It has the potential to steamroller emerging TTN IoT activity - through offering an ‘off-the-shelf’ network
it’s to be operated by a company that time and time again has shown to be incompetent in similar circumstances (eg public WiFi deployments which rarely work)
and
you have paperwork to go through to connect to it!
That’s just brilliant. A sure fire success in the making.
I’m now more concerned they’ll use it as an example that LoRa networks don’t work and NB-IoT is the way to go.
TTN backend is opensource, this allows anybody to do whatever they want with it. If they want to make a private network, they’re free do do it. This would prevent to have roaming across the various areas where TTN is deployed. Private networks will prevent this. But this depend on the need.
The connected private network bring the best of both world and is already part of the TTN plan, refer to the Wiki Backend overview
This can be driven by local requirements, if the contributor prefer to not have its data going in the public cloud, as the data paths are somehow controlled.
Regarding the overnight disconnection, I don’t think this can happen as the exit point of the said network would not be anymore TTN and would require network’s users to adapt their systems.
The equipment is being supplied by Everynet who sell a £600 gateway (supposedly CE certified, the one I saw wasn’t) and I think using their back-end.
The registration service is so that they can comply with any regulatory environment. The IP Act which is going through Parliament decrees anyone with more than 10,000 end-users (end-points?) is a Communications Service Provider and a CSP has obligations that they have to adhere to … which might entail logging every connection, etc. It also doesn’t like anonymous access to networks … (well the Government doesn’t at least).
