My experience with the Things Gateways

I ordered two Gateways (v1) last year when it did cost 300 EUR plus tax. While the GW was not even on its way, the price dropped down to 280 EUR., but that’s just a starter.

I was a little surprised that it has no PoE capability but more surprised that until today, I did not see any manual.

After setting it up, I wanted to disable Wifi. I heard it is not possible,

Since some weeks, it loses connections every few hours, while my outward VDSL connection is stable and uninterrupted over weeks, my external IP is fixed. We are having 100 Mbit/s down, 40 Mbits/up. I thought this should suffice.

In my last attempt to fix the connection issues, I upgraded to the beta firmware v1.0.3-2c56ce09 (2018-03-22T12:20:52Z). The connection issues continue.

I am still able to reach my gateway from the LAN here, the info page says “Broker connection: False” - if it is not able to hold a connection over a simple household router (Fritzbox 7560) that exists in the millions in Germany, what is it good for anyway?

I think the only option I have is to scrap both GWs: I can afford to throw away 600 + EUR because I am a professional company but what I am not able to sustain is constantly failing equipment plus added incessant travels to the gateways to reset theme every some hours. This is unacceptable to me.

The sad thing is: I am one of the key persons who deal with the rollout in the second bigger city in Germany, Freiburg. We are even collaborating with our local electric grid company who provides other gateways. As the things are today, I can only strongly warn against installing or buying those gateways. It is just frustrating, also the way how we are sometimes treated in this forum.

However, if you like to climb on your roof every day, it might still be a great gateway, I don’t know.

A post was merged into an existing topic: TTN GATEWAY central 2