It also has a proprietary PHY protocol, which always struck me as an major downside to something whose adoption is closing to making it the next de facto standa

It also has a proprietary PHY protocol, which always struck me as an major downside to something whose adoption is closing to making it the next de facto standard. DASH7 [1] is an interesting alternative in this regard, good for urban areas, but not quite as long range for very sparse nodes in a rural environment. It does not the same duty cycle limitations that LoRa has and is actually used to complement LoRa even on the same device in some interesting case studies [2] which come from Semtech themselves (the patent holders on the LoRa PHY). [1] https://dash7-alliance.org/ https://dash7-alliance.org/ [2] https://tech-journal.semtech.com/making-the-most-of-the-unlicensed-spectrum https://tech-journal.semtech.com/making-the-most-of-the-unli...