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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see how it does in rural areas. There's a gap in the market for GPS horse trackers because you can't count on any particular communications network, unless you use licensed amateur radio APRS.

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Rural areas would generally be much better due to the lower number of objects in the way. Now, that will give you less options for bouncing signals, but supposedly, you can achieve ~13 miles with line of sight.

My rural area (the northern frontier of Appalachian mountain range) doesn't have long lines of sight. Around here the high points are around 2000 ft above sea level and most of the population is in a network of valleys that dissect what would otherwise be a plane. Hilltops are wooded too (even on the many hills named "Bald Hill") so you have to add another 40 ft to your tower just to look into two adjacent valleys.

If, on the other hand, this hardware mounted on one of my buildings can cover my 70 acre farm and a bit of the valley around it, I could find a use for it.

Ideally these would be mesh networking and cheap enough to place in several spots on a ranch or farm. This way you could place half a dozen and get full coverage easily. Alas, I've read too many of the IoT radios of late and am not sure if the beep kits are mesh enabled.

I am highly skeptical of mesh networks.

Maintaining one radio is one thing, maintaining ten of them is another. Each one has a battery to worry about as well, can go bad, can be misconfigured, etc. Whereas if I have one radio on the roof my house or barn there is less to go wrong.

There is also no promise adding more nodes to a mesh network will improve performance since the nodes can interfere with each other. There is a huge literature on mesh networks because the area gets huge amount of military funding, and maybe the military really can use them, but I think they are a solution looking for a problem in an environment where people act as if wires were ritually unclean.

Your skepticism around deploying lots of hardware vs one central transmitter is valid. But I'm kind of confused by your comment about wires. It sounds like you're implying that a wired network will somehow make the equipment attached to it more reliable.

@whoa generally wired networks have been preferred in most industrial-scale sensor networks to ensure reliable connectivity. Until very recently I wouldn't have even considered doing an active control network over a wireless network. But recent IoT hardware and mesh networks have gotten surprisingly good!

@PaulHoule those are some good points. I would've agreed up until recently, but the newer IoT mesh radios have gotten surprisingly robust. The frequency modulators and collision detection baked into the last few iterations of lower cost IoT chips (like DigiMesh/Nordic chips) really have improved. We've been using DigiMesh 900 MHz units in a greenhouse setting with great success (especially compared to 2.4GHz which drops packets with abandon), with no measured packet loss to date. Pretty sweet!

To wrap that up, low-throughput but hi-scalability mesh networks combined with better firmware, network configuration, tuned mesh protocols, and proper software support to make the "throw a few of these down and forget them" scenario a real possibility. Check out the Beep networks blog for a longer explanation: http://blog.beepnetworks.com/2016/09/messy-networks-for-the-...

Sounds like an interesting challenge. Hit us up if you'd like to try out Beep's kit -- daniel at beepnetworks dot com.

I'd be interested in near-shore(a few miles out and cell service is unusable/you don't have a high thoroughput requirement). There are plenty of "nearish" ocean applications that could benefit from an extended range without requiring iridium(where packet costs can be a killer).

Shawn from Beep here. These use-cases sound really interesting. Send me an email? shawn at beepnetworks dot com

Hey what are your thoughts on sigfox? They got an investment from Samsung who are apparently integrating into their devices. Will this play out like vhs vs betamax?

the overall verdict from Lora alliance members on Sigfox is that they are big on words but small on revenue or customers. add grain of salt

~~Disclaimer : Sigfox employee ~~

Big on words, but not speaking about others ;)

I'd suggest anyone interested in LPWAN (be it Sigfox, LoraWAN or else) to get its own idea by field testing. Talk is cheap. Sigfox coverage is available in 25 countries, including some large US cities (SF, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, ..) http://www.sigfox.com/coverage

Get in touch if interested by more info about Sigfox, solutions for developers, etc.. http://makers.sigfox.com

What ocean application are you talking about?

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