# What happens if someone does not follow the guidelines?

**URL:** <https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/what-happens-if-someone-does-not-follow-the-guidelines/15298>\
**Category:** LoRaWAN Discussions\
**Created:** [June 25, 2018, 4:01pm UTC](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/what-happens-if-someone-does-not-follow-the-guidelines/15298 "2018-06-25T16:01:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 15

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**Author:** ![arjanvanb](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/user_avatar/www.thethingsnetwork.org/arjanvanb/32/46626_2.png) [@arjanvanb](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/u/arjanvanb)\
**Post date:** [February 11, 2019, 1:27pm UTC](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/what-happens-if-someone-does-not-follow-the-guidelines/15298/15 "2019-02-11T13:27:49Z")

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From another topic:

> [@Fair Use Policy explained](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/fair-use-policy-explained/1300/92):
>
> Tsvetan Usunov (Olimex) Was was saying recently in a [talk](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/oshw_smart_city/) that LoraWan has started to be unusable in Sofia because no one cares about duty cycles

At around 14"20’, transcript and emphasis mine:

> The long range is actually also a disadvantage of LoRa. Why? Because when you have **a receiver which receives in a 2 km area** , if you put a lot ot sensors there, let’s see, if you put more than 2,000 sensors in this range of the transmitter, they almost cannot connect to the gateway because everyone attempts to talk and jumps with somebody else who also wants to talk. So this is one of the problems with LoRa.
> 
> In Plovdiv we don’t have this problem. But in Sofia there are a lot of people who try to implement LoRa solutions. And, you know, they work on the license free frequency. But **“license free”, this doesn’t mean that this frequency is _yours_**. If you want to follow the standard, you should not talk more than 1% of the time. Nobody complies with this. They just talk until the gateway confirms that it received the message. And they make it impossible for other people to follow the standard.
> 
> So I had a customer last week and they said “show me where this LoRa works, because we tried in Sofia and it doesn’t work”. I said, yeah, here in Plovdiv it still works, because there are not **so many users who do not follow the standard and just emit content, maximum possible distance, the longest messages they can do, and don’t care about the others**.

Of course, the following [map](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map) only shows TTN gateways, but: I wonder if the above can be mitigated by installing more gateways, to decrease the cell size [along with ADR](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/adr.html):

 ![TTN Sofia](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/uploads/default/original/3X/b/2/b21210c2da9566fa6b4b1376ea45dd8286ea85eb.jpeg)

When one signal is a lot stronger than the other, than it can survive a collision [like mentioned above](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/what-happens-if-someone-does-not-follow-the-guidelines-smart-citys/15298/4).

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