Cisco is abandoning the LoRaWAN space, and there's no lifeboat for IoT customers | Hacker News Reader

Cisco is abandoning the LoRaWAN space, and there's no lifeboat for IoT customers

theregister.com

76 pointsBender32 comments

>The likely reason for discontinuing the LoRaWAN products is cost cutting.

Sounds reasonable. When you can get modules to do LoraWan and Meshtastic for $35, there's no way Cisco can make their margins.

Meshtastic seems like the coolest technology I'll never have a use for. What do you guys do with it? When cell signal is everywhere, what's the use for Meshtastic?

Cell signal isn't always everywhere. A friend of mine wanted to shoot a documentary in the middle of nowhere. I made a couple of modules that have GPS and LoRa radios to show where the other group is at all times. Easier than reading GPS coordinates over the radio and plotting them on maps.

This documentary never happened and so the project sits around collecting dust, but it was a fun weekend.

(Note, this isn't quite LoRaWAN or Meshtastic, which implies you want to uplink this to the Internet, but the idea is that off-the-grid radio links are still useful.)

> but the idea is that off-the-grid radio links are still useful

They are, you might want to link up with your local amateur radio group ("hams" for whatever reason in the US) though, they specialize in such stuff.

I'm also a ham radio operator (extra). No ham for commercial purposes, which is what this would be, so I went the unlicensed route.

I play airsoft in the middle of nowhere, when 300 people show up the cell towers can’t hold up and my phone signal is useless. Using LoRa radios we can still communicate long distances in the forest without using our voices.

My second use case is I build airsoft and paintball digital flags and scoring boxes using LED strips and microcontrollers. I plan to test and use LoRa radios for them to communicate through the forest and relay game status or even allow refs to control things for dynamic gameplay.

That's super cool. Do you publish your process of building these anywhere?

Sadly no, I am still designing and testing the units in the field to make sure they can withstand the elements. I probably should though as I imagine quite a few people would be interested.

That's pretty cool, thanks!

When the cell towers all went out in Asheville and the surrounding region, I definitely wished we had a backup mesh network, even if only for emergency services.

I read that there was in fact a meshtastic group that assisted emergency personnel.

Definitely not cell signal everywhere, the town I'm in has it, but go on a longer hiking trip into the mountains and you can potentially be 20-30 miles from the nearest house/road/person with zero cell service on any provider.

Even just a few miles up the OHV trail near my house has no service anymore. Pretty much none of the mountain area around the valley does.

That said I carry a garmin inreach, because while stuff like meshtastic is handy to link groups together and use for fun and utility, for safety you want something that works anywhere.

It’s good for music festivals in the middle of nowhere when cell service is either spotty or so overwhelmed with all the people.

Yes, it's deliberately a low bandwidth, cheap protocol. It's hard to make something with a big margin off it.

Still, it's bad for Cisco's reputation to abandon support for existing customers.

They never really were part of it. These gateways are barely used.

And their gateway was an extremely expensive but very mid range product.

the firmware releases were infrequent, the distro is not fully hardened, the linux kernel is old, and imagine having to get this notice now, at this point, and know that there wont be any further updates that fix future vulns. if u have this product, your firmware is now frozen and youre vulnerable to every future issue that affects it. looks like their support stops in 2029, but imagine these devices stay in place for another 10 years, this is a nightmare scenario for anyone with large deployments. in lots of cases we expect some devices to be in place for up to 45 yrs. still, this system wont make it past 2037, max. imagine running it for 12 more years without any fixes. untenable.

Don't companies with large deployments build in some kind of support deal with their supplier?

Buying large number of a hardware product automatically gives you some preferential treatment, as in both the client and the manufacturer must cooperate deeper just to absorb impacts and make logistics work.

You can't just click to buy a boatload of wireless earphones and have it delivered overnight, because regular boatloads has to go to regular stores. Regular 3-day shipping will become a 3-month delivery reservation or a 18-month supply contract. Potentially a special batch production, shipping, and trucks from port to your warehouse might have to be arranged. At that point the manufacturer might as well accept minor tweaks such as logo tweaks and configuration changes for that manufacturing run, or could even negotiate with you to take one just to prevent that batch disrupting regular consumer sales and supports.

But it won't increase combined total available budget of that operation above combined cumulative margins and cash flows, it won't print money, only distribute more effectively. So your contribution towards total "market cap" of the product might not make up for lost sales if product flopped even if you were an important customer.

yeah but even then, it's still just a contract. The legal math behind Cisco's decision might just be to extend support just long enough to meet obligations and tolerate the risk that the remaining customers might sue.

Only having less than 2.5 years of software updates left for an IoT device part of a global network is a bit of a mess isn't it? This is stuff you'd want to embed somewhere and forget I would have thought.

“Don’t want to” and “were willing to spend actual cash now to invest in stopping this problem before it shows up, but we won’t capture the value for several years” are very different statements for companies

Wouldn't the affected customers say that buying from a more expensive, established vendor like Cisco is supposed to be a way to spend the actual cash now to avoid abandonware problems later?

(And I suppose people who have been burned before would just say "ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha!")

Customers might feel and act that way, but companies sure dont

This is completely routine for Cisco. That's why you don't buy Cisco.

We've used LoRaWAN and never used the Cisco equipment, we've always used software/hardware from https://www.machineq.com

Anyone here know customers affected? I'm wondering if Seam could build a LoRaWAN gateway and get these guys out of this mess.

is Lorawan widely used by any IoT customers? from what i can tell, it's a pretty cool technology but has mostly remained a toy for hobbyists to play with.

which is probably why cisco is bailing.

yes at Seam we've seen a number of large deployment in multi-family buildings where you need to deploy devices (locks, thermostats, water leak sensors) but wiring the whole building with wifi isn't an option.

> wiring the whole building with wifi

Now there's an oxymoron

With Lorawan or meshtastic, what’s the practical max range for a line of sight connection between 2 devices (or a device and the base)? I have a need to mount a weather station on top of a mountain and our free flight club’s landing zone is about a mile and a half line of sight from there. The mountain gets a very weak cell signal (closest tower is probably 2-3 miles away) and would be great to have a better solution.

That sounds like exactly the sort of use case where I usually see lorawan deployed

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