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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

There is never any mention of bitrate when talking about LoRa. It's infuriating from someone on the outside.

From what I gather, the map says a "SF:12" which means a spread factor of 12, at a bandwidth of 125khz. With a code rate of '1' according to https://www.rfwireless-world.com/calculators/LoRa-Data-Rate-...

this means about 292 bits-per-second transmission rate for the packet. But I'm unsure if this is correct.

How hard would it have been to put that in the post? I feel like there is some conspiracy to never talk about bitrates/transfer rates in the LoRa world. Like, ever.

Just say it. It helps people understand what this tech is for.

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Good point. We'll add that to the next post if there is a new record. Also what can be confusing is that the business viable part is even much smaller than the technical viable part. The low power operations is really only at lower SF7 or SF8. And we push our partners and ecosystem to keep the payload as small as possible as every byte counts. It is a completely different way of thinking than WiFi or cellular. Yet I do agree it is presented with the same terms and paradigm and that is confusing.

> It is a completely different way of thinking...

On that point, have you looked at Myriota's research? (https://myriota.com/) In developing their system they went right back to the fundamentals and reworked everything around the idea of short messages. For example, an implicit assumption in the Shannon bound is that the message length is long, so they figured out that their short message system doesn't obey the Shannon bound and designed the coding and so on accordingly. It's fascinating stuff if you're into information theory.

You can do a lot with 292 bits per second if you use it well.

Yeah we now support 1.5M devices with our community network and enterprise network. And the most successful ones sent the least amount of data. Here is a list of all the supported devices: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/device-repository/

fwiw lora is meant for extreme low-bw applications, like a few key-value pairs per hour.

maybe not mentioning the bitrate discourages misappropriation?

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