This week saw the return of face-to-face of The Things Conference after long years of virtual events. The Things Conference is the major LoRaWAN ecosystem event. Not as commercial as LoRa Alliance event (even if the conference is a source of revenue for TheThingsIndustry), thanks to the presence of most of the guy’s who are doing the IoT.
This edition has interesting weak signals like the presence of a team from Unabiz (previously Sigfox), some Helium bashing at some time, even if most of the attendees have been participating on The People Network.
It’s a conference I can place on the maturity rising, many talk about use-cases, less about technologies. Lots of workshops where we have been able to implement / test advanced technologies like Lacuna Space communications or Semtech low power tracker.
Here are my through from the really great edition of TheThingsConference2022
Who doesn’t associate the word IoT with security issues in 2022? Apart from those who do the IoT maybe? Like all emerging domains, shortcuts are easy, because they are poorly understood. I will try to give you some elements on what cannot be denied: security, in the IoT, as in other technologies, is an essential element. I will especially take care to explain to you why it is very essential in IoT, why this subject is poorly understood and also, why many times we talk too much on this subject.
There are some domains where web3 application are promising. I already explored storj solution to store data and as a user point of view, it has convinced me. Now, I’m exploring the capabilities proposed by Streamr Network. This project has started in 2017 and still improving its development roadmap. It proposed publish & subscribe solution for standard protocols like MQTT, HTTP, Websockets. By design the solution is scalable and reliable. It currently has more than 4000 online nodes. The project will also propose a marketplace where to purchase data by subscribing to flows.
This blog post will detail my experience with this project and will be updated all along my usage of it, as miner and also as user.
Some time ago, a twitter thread made the community react about the amount of $6600 of communications consumption on the Helium network. This thread was full of approximations in order to present negatively the growth of the Helium network. But it is also an opportunity to take stock of the development of the use of the network. We will see in this article who operates the Helium decentralized network, what are the current data volumes and what are the associated financial metrics.
In short, we cannot talk about Nova Labs’ revenue with respect to direct communication costs because these costs are associated with different third parties offering the packet routing service. We cannot rely on this cost to estimate an associated business volume because there are many indirect costs as I have already specified in my blog post analyzing the running costs of a Helium router/console. Finally, regarding a long period where gamers found a way to earn a few dollars on the back of Nova Labs, involving many ancillary costs, distorted the data for June. You will understand all this in the rest of the article.
Disclaimer: I’m the owner of the public helium console helium-iot.eu (oui 6) – no need to makes comment like “he have written this because he own … blablabla”
The HIP-51 (Helium Improvement Proposal #51) starts a new way for Helium network. When it has started about 2 years ago, Helium has been designed to propose a global LoRaWan network. But, has I explained at the beginning of this journey, it’s not just a network, its the uberization of the telecom industry. In other words, once you find a good way to transform an industry, there is no reason to just transform on of its services, better is to transform all.
Telecom are not single network, they have IoT networks with LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, they have some WiFi services and 4G/5G services. The HIP-51 is basically a way to go that multi-service direction to compete with telecom industry.
I’ll detail in this post the way this is working (as much as I understood it, reading the HIP-51 currently under vote), and try to explain what will be the impact on the network and tokens.
The Helium router (aka console) is the LoRaWan network server. In a previous post I described how to setup a Helium router / console. In this post I will give you some details of what you can see in the grafana monitoring dashboard and this will help you to understand better how the network works to process the LoRaWan packets. We are going to detail what is an offer, a packet and the different monitoring information we can get from the router.
Helium is an open network, decentralized, there is a wide range of option you can do as a user, like creating your own private router to have your devices encrypted end-to-end. You can also make your LoRaWan traffic to be routed from Helium network to your own network when you are a LoRaWan network provider. Let’s take the exemple of a Telco with a LoRaWan network, let’s name it B’telco and imagine B’telco have an existing network in France. Imagine they want to extends their coverage worldwide, eventually reduce their local cost by removing some redundancy in the cities. In a such case, they can roam traffic over helium.
This means that the data of B’telco devices will be acquired by helium router, exactly as a Helium data, and then it will be routed to B’telco network server transparently. That way, the customer will have a better coverage and the B’telco cost for this worldwide extension will be really low.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how this roaming feature works and what is needed to deploy it.
Recently, on Linkedin, I reacted on a publication that is looking like this one. I’m used to react on LPWAN publication when they are comparing technologies as this one. Comparing apples with eggs and usually meaningless. This one was particularly interesting me because, most of the content is non-sense and scientifically subject to discussion. I’ll detail it in this blog post.
It’s really interesting the way it has been made and also the way the author publish it, react on it on Linkedin and what objectif is serves : capture people in a world where the truth is adapted to make you think only one of the technologies serves all the possible use-cases and all the others are the worst existing. The purpose is to sell you some books and services. This is really looking like the way flat hearth believers, radio waves danger believers and other groups do to find adepts and to sell goods to them. It’s really funny to see and discuss.
As the Author of the original document above considers his slide as “art” you can’t use, copy, cut (even if he published it online on social network) I have made my own one and simplify it to not entering in the expecting promotion this guy is looking for and to troll on the social networks. The curve you see are the exact copy of the original one. These data seems to come from a university work and are needed to be debunked. I just not mention the highlighted technologies other than Sigfox and LoRaWan because they are the one the slide tries to discredit and we will see how that’s wrong.
I do not identify the original author of that “artistic work” because I consider the scientific aspect of that “work” so bad that it discredit too much this person, its student and the associated university, that I don’t want to discredit these people directly. As I did on Linked-in but the author has immediately identify itself to start its promotion.
As I did not had access to the full study, sources of these graph, I can’t tell if the initial work quality that as been done is bad or if the context of the experience is explained. May be the original document explains different conclusions, so I’ll try to not judge too much the original work that has been done. I’ll judge what the author of the slide gave to us, as a single slide with pseudo-scientific information and a fake conclusion. Apparently, if you are ready to pay for the book / register… , you can get more details, thing I do not want to do to feed the troll.
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