What Is LoRa: The Fundamentals

[CrimsonCape]

If the article claims to cover the fundamentals, it sure misses the obvious "what is the purpose of this, why would I use this, what applications are there currently, what applications are prospective/future, what interest do corporations have in this?"

It seems like this is a new tech that companies are rallying the wagons around to generate patents but no clear indication of use cases yet. Is that a fair assumption? I've only seen videos of hobbyist devices.

[5ADBEEF]

You don't hear as much about LoRa as other wireless protocols because the use cases are less "sexy," in my opinion. The people who grew excited about LoRa or LoRaWAN are...electric and water metering engineers. Cool stuff, very necessary for the proper function of society, a better + more efficient solution, but kind of boring. The pros/cons of LoRa are apparent when compared to using other bands/protocols. BLE cannot be used over long distance very effectively because it is in the 2.4 GHz band. Cellular products are expensive to certify, complicated, and generally require higher power consumption (although some of our Norwegian brethren have closed that gap quite significantly for IoT applications). LoRa sits in a niche where it has long range, quite low data rate, minimal certification cost, and relatively low power.

Another technology that is just beginning to emerge as a direct competitor to LoRa/LoRaWAN is DECT-NR+. LoRa suffers because it uses a patented keying method and radios can only be produced by Semtech. DECT-NR+ is open and may make a dent in LoRa's market share in the future.

[livueta]

One cool usecase is https://meshtastic.org/ - been discussed fairly extensively on this site, have a search for it.