161–165 of 165 posts
I see some possible problems: - IMHO, price could be prohibitive for many use cases (e.g. water meters) - Signal strength could be an issue for urban environments (e.g. inside buildings) - There aren't many small business use cases for IoT connectivity that does beyond WiFi (both wrt range and power budget). What I have seen is that there are usually several big players (e.g. utilities, municipality, factories) that…
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Helium charges 0.00001$ per packet (about 24 bytes) using Lora protocol. But it's associated with crypto so people hate it. It also undercuts everything by a factor of 100x and is ubiquitous in US and western Europe.
The reason people are skeptical about its long-term longevity is that the vast majority of the income of the project is coming from the sale of hotspots, rather than from paying customers [1]. This means pricing for users is heavily subsidized by hotspot revenues right now. Eventually, the hotspot market will be saturated and prices will have to come up to keep the project afloat; it remains to be seen how competitiv…
* you can buy helium hotspots for $100 now, on par with other lora gateways
* " vast majority of the income of the project" is vague and incorrect. The hotspot OEMs (of which there are 50+) receive sales revenue, not "the project".
* You're referencing a Senet chart, which is actually a roaming partner on Helium. This isn't actually a helium coverage map.
I will correct myself on the coverage, about 98% of Americans are covered, not 98% of land in America. Oops. America is a big place.
Is this LoRa? I guess if it was they wouldn't need their own modems. There have been some hobbyist attempts to put LoRa gateways on satellites and from what I remember it worked reasonably well.
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People's appliances are almost all within range of cellular connectivity, which is cheaper and higher bandwidth.
LoRa's much lower energy, maybe? I can see cell networks if it's plugged in. Or maybe cell radios are cheap enough that you could put one in and fire it up once a day to squirt out data on how to better sell your kids sugary cereals...
I see some possible problems: - IMHO, price could be prohibitive for many use cases (e.g. water meters) - Signal strength could be an issue for urban environments (e.g. inside buildings) - There aren't many small business use cases for IoT connectivity that does beyond WiFi (both wrt range and power budget). What I have seen is that there are usually several big players (e.g. utilities, municipality, factories) that…
Why would you need a satellite connection in an urban environment?
- Wave paths are more complex (buildings, multi path propagation etc). Hence base stations need to be positioned more densely.
- Finding optimal locations for base stations and contracting the building/land owners is not straightforward.
- Using the less congested, licensed spectrum instead of the crowded ISM bands may be preferable in the city.