What Is LoRa: The Fundamentals | Hacker News Reader

What Is LoRa: The Fundamentals

medium.com

15 pointsnxa4 comments

If the article claims to cover the fundamentals, it sure misses the obvious "what is the purpose of this, why would I use this, what applications are there currently, what applications are prospective/future, what interest do corporations have in this?"

It seems like this is a new tech that companies are rallying the wagons around to generate patents but no clear indication of use cases yet. Is that a fair assumption? I've only seen videos of hobbyist devices.

You don't hear as much about LoRa as other wireless protocols because the use cases are less "sexy," in my opinion. The people who grew excited about LoRa or LoRaWAN are...electric and water metering engineers. Cool stuff, very necessary for the proper function of society, a better + more efficient solution, but kind of boring. The pros/cons of LoRa are apparent when compared to using other bands/protocols. BLE cannot be used over long distance very effectively because it is in the 2.4 GHz band. Cellular products are expensive to certify, complicated, and generally require higher power consumption (although some of our Norwegian brethren have closed that gap quite significantly for IoT applications). LoRa sits in a niche where it has long range, quite low data rate, minimal certification cost, and relatively low power.

Another technology that is just beginning to emerge as a direct competitor to LoRa/LoRaWAN is DECT-NR+. LoRa suffers because it uses a patented keying method and radios can only be produced by Semtech. DECT-NR+ is open and may make a dent in LoRa's market share in the future.

Another competitor to LORA (and the LORAWAN stack) is NB-IoT - a 4G variant.

They all occupy roughly the same space - high penetration, low bandwidth, low power telemetry for IoT systems.

The differences (from a development or product perspective) are in licenced (NB-IoT) vs unlicenced (LORA) spectrum, and in the infrastructure. With NB-IoT the infrastructure is owned by a telco, and you buy a SIM card. There are LORA operators, but you can also add your own base station if you need to.

If your product is primarily aimed at areas with NB-IoT coverage, it is the easiest way to go. But if you need to deploy IoT in areas without NB-IoT coverage, LORA is preferable (albeit at the cots of potentially having to manage your own base stations).

Sadly, there is no chipset that I am aware of that does both LORA and NB-IoT

One cool usecase is https://meshtastic.org/ - been discussed fairly extensively on this site, have a search for it.

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