Primer: LoRa vs LoRaWAN & How To Use It

Let’s break down the essentials of LoRa and LoRaWAN, two key players in the IoT landscape, and how you can leverage them for your business. At the heart of our discussion is the distinction between LoRa, the radio signal, and LoRaWAN, the comprehensive system that governs data transmission and structure. Think of LoRa as the car and LoRaWAN as the entire road network – it’s all about how these components work together.

We’ll also explore the four primary ways to utilize LoRaWAN: through public networks, community networks, private networks, and managed services.

In general, there are 4 different ways you could use a LoRaWAN.

They are Public, Community, Private, or Managed.

Public

You could subscribe to a public network operator or PNO, like Orange or Bouygues in France, Everynet in the U.S (and around the world), or AWS IoT Core or other PNOs.

PNOs install gateways across the city and offer the IoT connectivity as a service, so they’ll charge you a subscription to use their LoRaWAN.

Community

You could use a community network like TTN (the Things Network), where volunteers and organizations deploy gateways and share coverage for free. There is TTN coverage in most cities.

If there is TTN coverage where you are, you could just use it.

If you don't have coverage where you are, you would need to buy and install and set up a gateway, which would share your coverage with others.

Another community option is Helium. Helium has coverage almost everywhere in the developed world, and is how I got into LoRaWAN.

If there’s coverage where you are, you can use it for a very small fee. As an example, if you were to use the MeteoScientific LNS on Helium, you’d pay about $0.88/year to send a packet of data every hour.

You can also buy and deploy a Helium gateway, called a Hotspot, to provide coverage, earning cryptocurrency in return.

The difference between Helium & TTN is the cryptocurrency aspect, which drives the difference in gateways (and therefore, overall coverage.)

TTN has 21k gateways worldwide. Helium has 296,000. Cryptocurrency incentives are powerful.

Private

The third way to use a LoRaWAN is to stand up your own private network. You can buy your own gateways, buy a block of addresses from the LoRa Alliance and set up your own LNS where you’re the only one using it.

Managed

Finally, you can just hire companies to do the whole thing for you.

• My recommendation? Choose if you’re doing this for business or pleasure, then do the thing that’s best for that. If you’re geeky, running your own isn’t that hard. If you want someone else to do the tech lifting, reach out to me, I’m happy to make recommendations.

Links referenced in this episode:

• metsci.show
• console.meteoscientific.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Orange
• Bouygues
• Everynet
• AWS
• TTN
• Helium
• MeteoScientific

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