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Comment by MrQuincle | Hacker News Reader

Mmm. That's the thesis of the article?

"This mobile tracker is seemingly designed to resemble a popular Bluetooth tracker and sports a LTE-M radio and GPS receiver. But as mentioned here and here, a leopard can’t change its spots."

They try to be as low power as a Bluetooth tracker, but they just can't. It will never be actually low power.

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One (or a few) crappily implemented products doesn’t prove a point to me. As I’m bound by NDA on my prototypes, but I’ll do a little digging for public info I can share.

BLE was included to demonstrate that the convention for "low power" IoT devices is usually expressed in terms of years (of battery life). This is not saying BLE is a LPWAN, but in the minds of customers the expectation, like for LoRa, Sigfox, or active RFID, low power means years of battery life.

Show me a BLE device that has years (plural) of battery life.

https://www.blueupbeacons.com/index.php?page=maxi

On two AA batteries, 10 years. It's plural.

Ok, I partially stand corrected. But let’s get a few facts straight. First, the default config battery life is 4 years, not 10. Anybody can make a device that’s not useful for the intended purpose last forever. That said, the default config is a very reasonable 400ms IBeacon with Nordic chipset and transmit power of -8dbm. The important thing to note is that it’s using 2600mAh AA batteries. That’s not your off the shelf AA, but a very high power version of the AA (roughly 2.6x more energy each). Another important thing to note is it doesn’t do any sensor reading or two way communications, it’s just doing a blip of radio broadcast 2.5x a second. Still true BLE, yes, but also very much comparing apples and oranges to an LTE-M chipset and literally anything you’d do with it.

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