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

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

#91

Post by s3nnyy »

petra wrote: post #67
bdamm wrote: post #37

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 netwo…

But didn't IBM sided with LoRa ? doesn't it mean they tested it for scaling ?

I know a guy who worked for years at an IBM research lab near Zurich on Lorawan. I posted his thing a couple of weeks ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10344956).

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

#93

Post by s3nnyy »

There is a lorawan bootcamp soon coming up in San Jose (https://www.regonline.com/register/checkin.aspx?EventId=1732...).

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/).

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

#94

Post by fsiefken »

runeks wrote: post #32
kevinnk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Perhaps use mosh? It hides the lag on low bandwidth links. I remember using Citrix remote desktop on a 14k4 link. I remember using the internet at 14k4 - worked fine.

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

#95

Post by somberi »

blhack wrote: post #23
dconrad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

What tech are you using for the base station? I'd love to put one in our hackerspace out here :) -- a few offices of people working on IoT would probably think that was pretty cool.

+1 Bangalore, India.

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

#96

Post by KaiserPro »

jasonjs wrote: post #88
KaiserPro wrote: post #87

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... 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…

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

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

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

#97

Post by fsiefken »

1024core wrote: post #45

> 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 :)

Opus SILK can go as low as 6000 bs. You can use it in existing VoIP solutions, VoIP over LoRa radio's would be very cool.. but I'm not sure if you can layer tcp/ip on top them yet.

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

#98

Post by jbuzbee »

olympus wrote: post #53
runeks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 painfull…

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.

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

#99

Post by bdamm »

StavrosK wrote: post #47
jazzyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool stuff, sure. But, in my opinion, IoT will be slow to take off until the security aspect is solved - and it is a tough one.

That's exactly my problem too, and I decided to develop a prototype protocol for it. I wrote a reference implementation in python, feedback very much desired: http://stringphone.readthedocs.org/

* The weaknesses you outline in the introduction are pretty serious.

* How to exchange the topic key is described as out of scope, but totally critical since you also propose renewing the topic key as a way of attaining forward secrecy.

* You totally hand-waved away the exchange of participant keys.

* I'm pretty sure you've exposed some cryptographic weaknesses in the core protocol but I'm not going to spend the time to keep analyzing.

So in short, your protocol is not very useful. Sorry.

The biggest problems in IoT space are key agreement and machine trust among a hugely heterogeneous population. Solutions will come in the form of standards adoption, hegemony, government regulation, and probably a combination of all three. Multicast security is somewhat of a solved problem (e.g. wifi.)

Communications security between actual people is an entirely different and more easily solved problem.

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

#100

Post by semi-extrinsic »

jlgaddis wrote: post #89
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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".
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