Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Is NB-IoT actually being used these days? I remember it was hyped up but then the buzz disappeared.

The biggest fucking problem with NB-IoT or LTE-M is the goddamn carriers--both managerial and technical.

1) Managerial--Just like back in the old days when the carriers stupidly fought the change from voice to data they are stupidly fighting the change from humans using the network to machines using the network. And it's just as stupid this time around and it will be just as stupidly profitable for them after the fact.

2) The carriers refuse to support older firmware so you have to be able to do multi-megabyte firmware updates every 3 months. This is anathema to anything running on a battery as your firmware updates are like 2 to 4 orders of magnitude(not exaggerating) larger than the total actual data your device will transmit over its lifetime.

The carrier cranio-rectal impaction is why LoRA still continues to exist and expand.

3) Certified firmware*

* the telecom can and does blacklist IMEI numbers for unsigned firmware

* it is illegal to fix bugs that cause eSIM hardware lock-ups

* You can catch g05t5 on the carrier VPN network sandbox hitting each client

Sometimes it is better to wipe the slate clean, and start again... LoRAWAN certainly does make sense in some use-case applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOwbNUpDQA

> g05t5

What does that mean?

Don't worry about it, as it is difficult to explain on a public forum...

Have a great day, =3

https://youtu.be/uhCRK_5P51E?si=OkRLqjJzDSFMqMXk&t=1

We've used Sigfox with success but then they went almost bankrupt and I honestly didn't check where they are now or if it's safe to use them going forward. I still want devices to function 10 years from now.

In my corner of the world (electric/water/gas utilities), we had been using proprietary techniques that matched the "NB-IoT" description for 20 years, and they weren't new then. It was fun to watch the public dialogue walk the same path for a while and rediscover some of the main tricks, but there were other important tricks left untouched (broadcast firmware downloads, highly compressed debug logs, low power clock synchronization so that you can do timeslots for ultra low power, mesh heuristics) probably because they were a massive pain in the rear and the people who would have risen to the occasion saw that the major ecological niches were already occupied by players who got in 30 years ago when this all became viable. (Disclaimer: I didn't actively chase down NB-IoT talks so I might just have been missing these things.)

If your market is large enough that managing your own infrastructure is attractive (vs cellular), you were also able to afford a few EEs and RF guys 30 years ago, and your needs are already met by a competitive ecosystem of players who have been walking this path for a long time. It doesn't leave much to compete on except price, and you don't want to compete on price.

That makes me envious. I've figured out the debug log compression part myself, but the rest is beyond my reach.

> If your market is large enough that managing your own infrastructure is attractive

This. I imagine proprietary is perfect when you are deploying in a single country with single RF plan. And your customer utility company that is willing to maintain a bit of extra infrastructure. But if you want to deploy on several sites scattered across all ITU regions, and each site is a huge plant with devices from maybe fifty different suppliers, it's just a no-go.

It definitely does, at least in Europe, not sure how things are on the other side of the pond. For the user equipment there is no real advantage over LTE-M, actually is LTE-M better for our case (send a single packet a day and go to sleep). But then I don't see the picture from the operator side, maybe the radio savings actually matter for them. Some operators either don't have LTE-M at all or don't allow PSM on LTE-M because screw you that's why. On NB-IoT PSM is mandatory at least. And yes, LoRa/Sigfox/other non-cellular LPWAN might technically be better IF you provide the base stations. Nobody wants to do that. With cellular you can just mail the device and cross your fingers the operators haven't misconfigured roaming.

That's quite interesting. And the promised battery lifespans of NB-IoT device, did it hold some truth? In the beginning we heard about 10 year life spans for simple well designed devices.

We have millions of devices in the field older than that on the same D-cell LiSOCl2 battery they shipped with. Some of them even take magnetic measurements with powered excitation!

You'll have to wait 10 years to see. But on paper it does (we aim for 15) and we have devices in field for some three years.

But for the "simple well-designed" - the problem is, the whole thing is a black box for application developer, and not a bugless one. So much of the "well-designed" part is to figure out when is the right time to pull modem's proverbial power cord. If you don't, it'll gladly eat up your battery in 48 hours after a cell handover goes wrong with no warning.

No. Because carriers are idiots.

The carriers require you to allow them to force a firmware upgrade on you. This kills your battery dead long before anything you would do on the device will.

Technically, however, 10 year battery life is generally unreasonable. Most batteries that exist self-discharge over 10 years. 5 years is doable, but requires quite solid engineering. 3 years is pretty reasonable for most things.

If you want 10 year lifetimes, I think you specifically need lithium thionyl chloride batteries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com