Needs someone like these guys https://herelab.io/ to help develop more low’ish cost use-case based sensors.
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.
There is always the space outside of zone 1 to conquer!
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.
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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.
Had a look at their offering last night and a chat with them. Main points are:
- Registration with proof of who you are plus postal address needed
- A limited number of sensors and topic end points per user, number not yet decided. More would be available for special projects but you need to ask
- Is for non-commercial use, this might be the free version though.
- Currently up and running with at least 1 gateway
- Their backend is similar to TTN
- Data is sent to the users own endpoint, didn’t get if this was via MQTT or just a JSON payload in HTTP message.
- They a looking for beta testers!
More info to come out once they get users on the systems.
Thanks
Andrew
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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).
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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.
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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
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And here is the intent to roll the network out to other communities through IoT Boost. https://iotuk.org.uk/iotuk-lpwan-boost-2016/
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So if I’m reading this correctly:
- you can’t run your own gateways
- 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.
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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.
Like suspected: just marketing spin 
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).
I’ve been accepted as an alpha tester on the service, however it’s under NDA so I’ll post here what I can
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They’re actually launching next year and are installing base stations, looks quite nice from what I’ve seen
look