A wireless network for gadgets set to arrive in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

A wireless network for gadgets set to arrive in San Francisco

computerworld.com

59 points11thEarlOfMar20 comments

It's an exciting technology but isn't a silver bullet for all connected objects either:

from Sigfox website > On SIGFOX you can send between 0 and 140 messages per day and each message can be up to 12 bytes of actual payload data. The protocol already transmits the device ID, so the 12 bytes represent the actual payload and there is no limits on how you can structure the 12 bytes.

So if I'm correct you can only transmit 1.64 KB per device per day.

Considering the article says it operates at 100 bits/second, a daily allocation of 1.64Kb takes a minimum of 2 minutes and 14 seconds to transfer (about 1 second per message).

It's hard to link directly, but here is some info for developers http://sigfox.com/en/#!/technology

Ought not this prompt carriers to leverage their existing networks to deliver a similar product. In Australia Telstra delivers 3G via 800mhz - I've been in the middle of buttfck nowhere and still been able to get 5mbit downstream. I'm not aware of any technical reason why existing carriers couldn't deliver a competitive service -ie. rate limited and tiny upload / download qutoa- for dollars per year.

Looks like they're running on 900MHz. To be effective, 900MHz antennas usually must be rather large. May limit the useful applications.

Edit: I stand corrected. http://www.slashgear.com/whistlegps-dog-tracker-first-to-use...

Yes that is correct, with traditional antenna design. I believe the collar itself has a hidden antenna to allow good impedance matching.

Coming from communications engineering I find ultra band modulation scheme intriguing. I haven't seen any papers that on what this is exactly and am waiting for more information to come out!

Ps: there is work on metamaterial based antenna design to shrink antenna dimensions http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_antenna

This seems really sketchy to me - they use terminology nobody else uses so it's totally unclear how they would share the 900MHz spectrum, which is very polluted.

it shouldnt be that unclear how to share the 900mhz spectrum. fcc part 15 reg indicate how to do this ( freq hoppong etc ). companies like northwest emc help device makers verify compliance and generate correct reports.

+1 for NW EMC, I enjoyed working with them.

What I meant was there's no detail on the modulation they are planning to use and no mention of frequency hopping.

I wonder what they mean by "Ultra Narrow Band", at those bit rates it seems you would need hardly any bandwidth at all anyway.

ah, got it. yes, what they'll actually do is another matter entirely. :)

This indeed fills a nice gap, promising!

The sigfox.com website is IPv4-only. Let's hope they show more foresight when it comes to the network design.

Criticism truly is the currency of HN.

The only way we'll ever move beyond IPv4 is to criticize every new thing that requires it.

I don't know whether that's the case for this network (for all I know, it might not be IP-based at all), but the inability to dual-stack one's public-facing website, nearly two years after World IPv6 Launch, is a failure that more people should acknowledge.

Do you know who hosts their website?

195.154.183.147 -> AS12876 -> http://www.online.net/

I use IPvFoo to get the IP address, then copy-paste it into http://bgp.he.net/ . Note that the www.online.net does at least have working AAAAs.

That implies that the lack of ipv6 support on their website has nothing at all to do with their technology.

Criticism is how you figure out what to improve.

And, for what it's worth, I agree: If we're going to have lots of little devices, we're going to need IPv6's larger address space.

Given:

- how many Unintended Consequences happen in protocol interactions

- how easy it would be to DDOS a tiny, low bandwidth device

- how bad nanufacturers are at writing security oriented software

Is a fully end-to-end internet actually a good idea?

It was a dream, and now a nightmare.

All those little devices at your house are going to be BLE connected to some device behind a NAT firewall.

Globally-unique does not imply globally-reachable. Any security feature you dream up for IPv4 can be applied to IPv6 as well. The fundamental issue is not public vs. private, it's whether you want to design new technology around an address space that's far too small.

Here's the spec for IPv6 over BLE: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6lo-btle-01

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