4 ms·
I'm working on a different LoRa-related startup, and I can say with pretty high confidence that most people hear "mesh network" and jump directly to, "so I can
by rcoder 4y ago
I'm working on a different LoRa-related startup, and I can say with pretty high confidence that most people hear "mesh network" and jump directly to, "so I can check Facebook from anywhere?" (Replace Facebook with Slack, Zoom, YouTube, or any other bandwidth-hungry, "use it all day" app you can think of.)
And yet, the theoretical (not even real-world) bandwidth for LoRa is in the hundreds of bytes per second; perhaps whole _kilobytes_ if you're giving up most of the range and power savings that LoRa offers for traditional IoT.
On the "small devices exchanging small amounts of data" front, LoRa, particularly for large-scale deployments like the ones Helium resells access to, faces a lot of competition from Thread, Matter, and other "home-scale" mesh options. Until Apple or Samsung puts a LoRa radio in their handsets, it's going to be a niche product. (Unlikely because Semtech owns all the patents on LoRa. One of them might _buy_ Semtech, but I imagine they'd shell out $2 per handset approximately _never_.)
- digdugdirk 4y agoDo you have any good starting points for reading up on the differences between LoRa and traditional WiFi? Both technical and practical.