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dconradon It’s Time to Kill the Casual Interview

Quite the contrary. Informal interviews provide no real information and cause interviewers to fall-back to stereotyping and unconscious bias. Formal interviews, done right, provide real data.

dconradon LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

True in Europe (CE) but it works differently in the US (FCC).

The FCC limits time spent transmitting in a single channel ("time on air"), but there's no duty cycle limit if you follow the channel hopping rules.

dconradon LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

Sounds like an interesting challenge. Hit us up if you'd like to try out Beep's kit -- daniel at beepnetworks dot com.

dconradon Messy Networks for the Internet of Things

Good point. I meant ad hoc tower deployment, not ad hoc mesh networks. Our topology is (mostly) star. Will update to clarify.

dconradon LoRa Wireless Range Is Bananas. First Look at Cellular for IoT in San Francisco

http://blog.beepnetworks.com/

dconradon Why Amazon Is Going to Build Its Own Cellular Network

Some folks have asked -- is this really a cellular network?

In the strictest sense, Yes -- it's a coordinated group of basestations which together form a large area network.

The network stacks are not (yet) a part of the 3GPP standard. Handoffs are different. Cells can overlap and don't need to be planned in the same way as traditional cellular networks.

But the reason for these differences is to make the network better for IoT -- battery life, number of devices supported, etc.

Also, if LoRaWAN and others aren't cellular, then neither are the emerging LTE IoT standards. They follow similar strategies.

Or, that's my view anyway. Thoughts?

dconradon TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

Appears that TP-Link's heart is not in this -- they're doing the minimum to comply with FCC rules.

Will be interesting to watch the arms race between OpenWRT and the reluctant ODMs.

dconradon On the Benefits of Cutting Your Own Hair

Maybe if you keep trying you'll get it right. :)

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

I love those guys go support them! But you will have to wait a while for their hardware.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

that's 1600 devices simultaneously communicating. a sensor might only spend a fraction of a percent of its time transmitting data, so the number of devices supported is orders of magnitude higher.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/sx1272-and-sx127...

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

nice, hit me up, daniel@

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Yes, on the Continent, at least! I'm not sure about the UK.

Both LoRa and Sigfox came out of French companies, and several wireless carriers have announced plans to build networks. Also check out The Things Network guys in Amsterdam who are trying to crowdsource a network, very cool stuff.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Maybe -- throughput depends on which radio tech we're talking about, and the networks need to get built with density appropriate for the task.

LoRa radios that are close to a gateway can dynamically shift to a 300 Kbps mode, or down to a long-range mode that's ~10Kbps (but yes could also be degraded further by error rate if at edge-of-range).

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Killer -- where's your hackerspace?

LoRa basestation gateways are available off-the-shelf for from Kerlink, Multitech, and Link Labs. The gateways are actually quite simple, they just forward packets to the cloud network server, and back to the clients.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Standard 800/900/2400 antennas on the client devices, obviously you can get more range out of a long high-gain antenna, but PCB antennas work as well.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Security in the LoRaWAN standard is well thought-through, you might be surprised.

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

Glad you agree. :)

We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)

dconradon How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

For LoRa, check out Multitech, LinkLabs, and Libelium. Semtech has a development board, too, though it would need to be paired with a microcontroller. Warning that most of this stuff is not for the faint of heart -- you need to be ready to dive into datasheets, bring up radio drivers, etc.

For Sigfox, if you're not in an area with a Sigfox network, there's not much you can do. But TI has some killer FSK dev boards. http://www.ti.com/tool/smartrftrxebk and http://www.ti.com/tool/cc1101cc1190emk915

Ingenu has radio modules and dev boards, but I don't think they're set up to sell single-unit quantity.

If you're in San Francisco, we're making a going to be distributing dev boards that will work out of the box and come with a bunch of sensors. Just sign up on our website: www.beepnetworks.com