Hacker News Reader

LoraWan is inherently monolithic. There is only supposed to be one LoraWan provider, who acts as the router, and passes traffic to receiver according to their address -- just like a cell tower. You don't have a hundred cell towers, you have 3.

View on HN

Not so. Sigfox has a single operator model: they're the only operator for their proprietary technology. But LoRa is multi-operator: anyone can buy LoRa base station and deploy their network (it's in unlicensed spectrum). And it's already happening this way. So several operators and even technologies will share the same limited unlicensed spectrum. Should be interesting when it scales...

It was designed to be "single operator", but that's not how it is shaking out. I think a trainwreck is coming, because if you have multiple LoRaWAN networks operating in the same area, all the packets are colliding at layer 2. They have to be thrown away by the server. And since the Semtech SX1301 baseband chip only has 8 demodulators, capacity quickly approaches zero, if there are multiple uncoordinated networks.

LoRaWAN is an okay solution for European Carrier networks where duty cycle limitations come into pay, but for the 915MHz band, it is not a good design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com