New band coming to Australia?

We’re seemingly about 18m away (2021-07-01) from having a new band (928-935) available, low-power and duty cycle but also presumably a lot less noise. Word doc here, see Appendix B

IOT Alliance (Australia) said in 2016 it’s 25mW EIRP and 1% Duty Cycle. I think that works for otherwise very competitive environments (at AU915/AS923), I saw some comment that 933-935 might be more restricted, I think the cellular providers were worried about interference.

That band would be pretty unconflicted and provide yet more choice in the .AU marketplace. It’d also fracture coverage further, if TTN supports it, but I’d be interested in thoughts on that. We’re already fairly well off in Australia so perhaps it’d be better to leave it to other IoT networks?

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Read the restrictions on the use of this “extended” band very very carefully.

Some city trunking operation will have cease or move to another freq.

Most LoRa nodes are 100mW and Gateway 1watt.

How would a busy gateway operate effectively with these restrictions?

Table 3 of the Doc refers to the use of “Low power/duty-cycle fixed links/mesh nodes”. I would interpret that to mean that LoraWan (being a Point to Multi-point system) does not meet this requirement. Lora point-to-point links and a series of Lora nodes that work in a mesh network would comply. Then they need to comply with the power and duty cycle requirements.

Could someone please send me the link to the ACMA documentation of the “new” band? That’d be great.

ACMA Word doc here , see Appendix B

Haha cheers, ACMA official documents are word docs, that’s funny.

Yep I agree with @TonySmith I don’t think it effects anything in the lorawan world. If only the mobile operators would allow us on to the same frequencies as Europe and get a standard happening.

There is an ETSI proposal to use 915 in Europe. No idea what’s required to clear this band but from memory the timing was the next year or two.
Its not to create a common global band but to increase capacity in Europe.

Ah nice, thanks tony, I have read that somewhere but was very dubious on it actually happening, fingers crossed.

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The linked legislation hasn’t (and I guess won’t be until 2021) updated yet to clearly specify the requirements. A class-A device with no ADR (so minimal downlinks) could still meet the power/duty requirements with a gateway, and 25mW in an uncongested band could well beat 100mW.

I agree the wording makes it sound more like they want ZigBee mesh kinds of things. Getting the smart meters into another band would still be a net positive for other users like us though.

Thanks folks, I am enlightened.

I’m fairly sure there are already some here using 928, we have one TTN/TTI gw in our area that does.