
How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things - slewis
https://medium.com/@dconrad/how-new-long-range-radios-will-change-the-internet-of-things-ed8e6b5e367f
======
blhack
This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health
devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the
things that we're doing.

The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is
super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep
sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the
range on BLE isn't great.

Some companies use general purpose radios (these guys:
[http://www.glowcaps.com/](http://www.glowcaps.com/) are basically an couple
of atmega 328s and some 433mhz radios) for range, but it seems like everything
is moving towards BLE because you can use your cellphone/tablet as a base
station.

If LORA can seriously get this sort of range (I'm skeptical, honestly), then
that is a total game-changer for IoT.

A friend of mine at a chip manufacturer in town was telling me about some
radio thing they were doing that had range like this about a year ago, but I
didn't believe him. That little of power, for that long of range seems like
straight-up magic.

Super cool stuff! Very excited to see this really happening!

Not to get too silly, but this about sums up how this makes me feel with
regards to IoT:
[https://media.giphy.com/media/rl0FOxdz7CcxO/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/rl0FOxdz7CcxO/giphy.gif)

~~~
dconrad
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.)

~~~
vegabook
Anything similar going on in Europe? London specifically? I would love to
create some pocketable hardware that never needs recharging and sends text and
(compact) vector-based graphical market updates to people.

~~~
dconrad
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.

------
th0ma5
Lower power, but highly processed radio signals are fascinating to me. I've
been playing with WSPR on the 10 meter band which is fixing (hopefully) to
open up a little here over the next couple of months. With about 1/10th of the
power of my Wi-Fi router and a long wire over top of the house, I've been
picked up so far this year in California from Ohio. Last year I was heard
almost daily in Europe. A blogger I follow with a bit more power but still
less than a watt has been heard on several continents almost every other day
from the UK.

Anyway, signals are a function of time as well as bandwidth, and with more
precise clocks in our devices and higher CPU power to make sense of it, it is
an exciting time live and see what's next.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Ok, since there are some radio wizards in this thread: if I want to log low
bandwidth sensor data (so < 1kbps) on a unidirectional (if that helps) link
over ~ 500m, almost clean line-of-sight with some trees in there, what are my
options? I'd prefer to spend little money and use little power on the sensor
end. I'm considering an ESP8266 (so 802.11) with a high-gain directional
antenna. Sender and receiver are fixed locations.

~~~
jlgaddis
I'm not sure what you mean by "little money" but for less than $100 per
location, you could have a 100+ Mbps link using Ubiquiti NanoStations. You can
use Wi-Fi or their proprietary protocol and the radios are available on 2.4,
3.65, and 5 GHz. These little things will cover your 500m link with ease but
might very well be extreme overkill if all you really want is <= 1 Kbps
throughput.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Yeah, that's definitely overkill, but those are cool for applications needing
the bandwidth. For comparison, the ESP8266 costs ~ $5, so that's "little
money".

------
Joeri
Our offices are equipped with sensors with LoRa radio's. We're partnering with
a local cell service provider (proximus.be) who are upgrading their base
stations to be LoRa base stations and we're a pilot installation because we're
developing software that does things with the sensor data (smart office type
stuff, like adaptive cleaning schedules based on space utilization). The
sensors are pre-configured for their network. You stick them to the wall, pull
a latch, and they connect directly to the public base station, no additional
hardware involved. Surprisingly, it works, and they're claiming five years
battery life.

There are some downsides though. The sensor+radio combo's are custom orders
for now, meaning they take too long to arrive and are too expensive. That
issue will get solved over time. They also have an extremely low data rate. A
single set of values every 15 minutes. That issue probably won't be solved.
Still, you can learn a lot from a CO2 reading or a door opening counter
reading even if it's only every 15 minutes.

The hard bit is the intelligent software that processes the data. If anything
is the achilles heel of IoT it's that lots of data does not necessarily lead
to any insights.

------
bdamm
Don't get too excited. Low-power devices get really interesting when they
start to scale up in numbers. None of the technologies listed in this article
have demonstrated that capability. The coming IoT shakedown is going to leave
quite a few ebullient "visionaries" crying in their martini while they
consider their next startup.

* Star networks are infrastructure heavy, requiring build-outs on part with cellular networks, and having low per-base density.

* LoRa's CSS (Chirp Spread Spectrum) approach doesn't promise to scale well, as devices start to interfere with each other over its very wide spectrum scattershot. There are other problems.

Disclaimer: I work for an IoT mesh company (SSNI/WiSun) and we're busy
cranking out massive networks that actually work. Sadly you can't get a dev
kit at Fry's yet.

~~~
slewis
Shawn from BeepNetworks here. Check out OnRamp (now Ingenu). Their coding
scheme allows 1600 simultaneously communicating devices per spread factor per
channel. That 1600 factor means their base station can handle massive numbers
of clients compared to cellular. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/273814075/On-Ramp-
Wireless-White-P...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/273814075/On-Ramp-Wireless-
White-Paper#scribd). That paper is certainly biased in their favor, but the
tech is real and they have serious deployments.

The counterpoint to mesh is that it's a) much more complex to implement b)
uses more power since nodes need to relay each others' communications.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out, and who ends up crying in
whose martinis as you say.

~~~
wyldfire
Hm, 1600 sounds like a lot. But depending on the applications it sounds like
it might not be that much if it's 1600 over three square miles.

~~~
dconrad
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.

------
TeMPOraL
> _So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device._

Can someone tell me some names of those radio chips? I'm in Shenzhen, if they
exist they should be available here. I want to buy some for a few bucks.

~~~
jasonjs
These radios have been available for quite some time, it's the Semtech SX127x
line (e.g. SX1276). I was looking into LoRa and other long-range IoT WAN
radios about a year ago for a research project.

You can get cheap (22 USD) Arduino-compatible development boards here using
HopeRF modules, which work great with the RadioHead library:

[http://www.anarduino.com/miniwireless/](http://www.anarduino.com/miniwireless/)
[http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RadioHead/](http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RadioHead/)

(I have no affiliation with the websites.)

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beardicus
I just saw this kickstarter this morning, with related technology:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-
ne...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-
network?ref=balls)

They seem to have set up an open LoRa network in Amsterdam.

------
Animats
The main innovation here is battery life. You can do most of these things now
with two-way pager technology.[1] There are a lot of commercial air
conditioning units and vending machines phoning home that way right now. They
all have AC power, so battery life isn't an issue.

Two way pagers have more or less died out for humans, but for M2M (machine to
machine) communication they are alive and well.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX)

------
jws
I'm intrigued. Anyone want to suggest an economical development board or
transceiver?

~~~
dconrad
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](http://www.ti.com/tool/smartrftrxebk)
and
[http://www.ti.com/tool/cc1101cc1190emk915](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

~~~
kazazes
If you haven't lost your faith in Kickstarter yet, this project has $180k
committed. A €40 pledge will get you a LoRa board and €200 for a LoRa gateway
and what is essentially a demo dongle.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-
ne...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-network)

Edit: fat thumbs, on mobile.

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

------
s3nnyy
There is a lorawan bootcamp soon coming up in San Jose
([https://www.regonline.com/register/checkin.aspx?EventId=1732...](https://www.regonline.com/register/checkin.aspx?EventId=1732983&MethodId=0&EventSessionId=&startnewreg=1)).

I attended this bootcamp in Zurich, Switzerland a couple of days ago and it
was quite interesting. Swisscom, the biggest Telco here covered Zurich and
Geneva already with a lorawan net and they will give access to it during an
upcoming hackathon ([http://iot-hackathon.swisscom.com/](http://iot-
hackathon.swisscom.com/)).

------
1024core
> So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device.

Where?

> Think kilobits-per-second, not megabits-per-second.

Well, voice _is_ (or was...) 32kbps, so technically you could make a voice
call over these radios, if they can give you 32kbps? I've heard of voice
compression as low as 8kbps too. Imagine a cellphone that lasts months :)

~~~
jasonjayr
Codec2 is an open source speech codec, shooting for 700 - 3200 _bit_ /s,
specifically for digital voice over radio.

[http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452)

------
bertm
LoRa is a really cool technology. We are incorporating it into our networking
stack/ hardware module. From field testing, we've seen about 4-6 miles line of
sight, and about a mile through an urban environment (parking garage,
apartment building, etc). Plus the bare radio chips are less than $10 bucks.

------
icholy
I wonder how it will scale. Sure, you can use spread spectrum but to other
unlicensed users it will look like the noise floor is increasing. As more
people connect, the more noise there will be, and the players will either
increase their power to maintain their SNRs, or have to slow down their rates.

------
KaiserPro
if anyone wants to play with LoRa you might want to play with the RFM 69

[http://rdepablos.merlitec.com/mixed/rfm69-library-for-
raspbe...](http://rdepablos.merlitec.com/mixed/rfm69-library-for-raspberry-pi)

Gets about 1.6 miles with basic wire antenna. More if you play with
directional yagis or the like

The problem with LoRa is that yes you can get ten miles, assuming you chose
the right antenna and radio, but you wont be able to transmit for very long.

I have a number of sensors that have RFM29 radios in them, and they run off
solar and super caps. However they only transmit once a minute, and they don't
stay on for a reply.

Power management is key at low power levels. To get ten years battery life,
you either need massive batteries, or only transmit once every day/hour.

~~~
jasonjs
The RFM69 does not use LoRa, maybe you meant the RFM95W/96W?

~~~
KaiserPro
Sorry yes. The 69 is a packet radio, which gives you more freedom, in the same
way raw ethernet does.... :)

------
boothead
Fun fact: spread spectrum was invented by a hollywood actress during WWII
[http://www.women-inventors.com/Hedy-Lammar.asp](http://www.women-
inventors.com/Hedy-Lammar.asp)

------
JupiterMoon
Would this open possibilities for a direct machine to machine network that
didn't go over the internet? (I.e. could I set up something to ssh to my home
server from my laptop without needing wifi/cellular coverage?

~~~
upofadown
The data rate is really low. So maybe, if you are patient and are not much
more than a mile from home.

~~~
kevinnk
Data rate in the US is something like 11kbps. So you'd have to be _really_
patient.

~~~
runeks
Isn't 11 Kbps fine for SSH? That's 11 thousand ascii characters per second.
The latency is the important part, I assume this is low as well but I don't
know.

~~~
olympus
Actually each ascii character takes up a byte (8 bits). You can get this down
to just 7 bits if you aren't using the extended table, but a byte is very
convenient and what most programs use for the size of a char.

That means that with an 11Kbps line you are getting about 1,000 characters per
second once you factor in other communication over head (stop bits, parity
bits, etc). While this may sound fast it is painfully slow for anything other
than typing in single line commands and reading single line responses. The
transfer of a blank 4KB text file will take three seconds. The transfer of a
plain text file the size of a book would take a few minutes.

With the additional overhead of SSH you will actually see the characters
appearing on the screen like a lame 80s hacker movie.

~~~
jbuzbee
As someone who remembers 300 baud modems used in a trans-atlantic connection,
I also remember that you could get stuff done if you set your expections
accordingly.

------
fit2rule
You know what will really change the IoT? Energy-harvesting. (As soon as the
powers that be stop interfering with it at the foundry level, that is..)

------
sbierwagen
Yeah, but how big are the antennas?

~~~
dconrad
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.

------
andyl
Looks like LoRa is star topology. Is there another comparable tech that
supports mesh networking?

