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Comment by wienke | Hacker News Reader

For sure would be great but LoRa has limitations as it is designed for small sensors that sent very little data: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations/

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Ah, I see. Seems like directional antennas for WiFi would be what I need then.

Yes. 2.4GHz ones will do fine (and better than 5GHz for that range).

You're looking LoRaWan which is not the same as LoRa. In fact I believe web browsing to be quite feasible if you just use LoRa with your own network stack.

How would that exactly work?

I did this once as a small experiment. Basically use a small TCP stack with LoRa as layer 1 and then expose the whole thing as a Linux kernel module. It was a bit shitty but it seemed promising.

For some reason, I don't find LoRaWan at all alluring. As far as I can tell, in the end it's in the hands of one company and that really defeats the spirit for me. I mostly just use LoRa for point-to-point connections with my own shitty networking stack.

At least on 868 MHz, if you stick to the 1% duty cycle limitations that the ISM band allows, I doubt that you'll be happy with the web surfing performance.

(For those that don't know duty cycle limitations: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/duty-cycle/)

This may be an EU duty cycle vs US time per channel thing? In the US you can frequency hop to get higher performance (the limit here is no more than 400ms per 20s per channel), which seems more aggressive than the 1% power sub-band EU rule (but ianal and I haven't read the EU rules carefully).

That is pretty cool. You might want to try again with 2.4Ghz LoRa. Range is shorter but still longer than 868mhz. If you search 2.4Ghz LoRa on our Youtube channel you'll find some interesting content on that.

Not at all. The effective speed is extremely low due to the duty cycle.

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