Debunk an LPWAN / IoT comparison

The LPWAN comparison artwork

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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Is Sigfox finished?

Since yesterday, the microcosm of the IoT has been in turmoil, Sigfox, the Toulouse company, pioneer of the Internet of Objects, the one which had carried out remarkable fundraising for France: 100M then 150M is placed in receivership. But is it really a surprise? Is this the end of this technology?

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IoT slidedeck 2021-07 update

On regular basis, I’m updating my IoT slide-deck used for trainings, MooC and conferences. You can find in the attached pdf more than 260 slides about IoT market, use-cases and technologies.

Feel free to use it for your own training, presentations, content is free to use, please just place a link to this website as a counterpart.

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Did we have a Sigfox Connect in 2020 ?

Sigfox Connect is usually one of the MAIN EVENT for the LPWAN community as the technical solutions provided by Sigfox were, in the last 5 years, the one presenting disruptive innovations around low power radio communications suporting the IoT revolution. I was usually rushing on my blog to communicate and explain how these innovations could transform our markets…

This year in 2020, I’ve made 5 days before starting to write something because, I see nothing really interesting to tell about this event, at least on the technical side. I could fill many pages on the quality of the event, starting by the backgrounds, the phone ringing in background, even on recorded conferences and the number of conferences about the same topic (supply chain). Christophe Fourtet had a great talk… for Sigfox beginner… and my preferred event’s backgrounds. But what about the yellow texts scrolling ?!? WTF !

So, I could write tons of line on this topic, but let’s try to go to the only and main announcement of this year, nothing technical, something like a company business pivot. Basically, after watching Ludovic conference, I had to refer to the only one online press post to understand what it was about. The morning keynote had some of the elements related to it but honestly I give the same to my IoT students on the first 30 minutes, so for the vision I’ve been a bit disappointed. You can check my IoT slidedeck.

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IoT overview 2020 update

Traditional update of my teaching support on IoT. This year I’ve addressed my speak to larger and different audiences. As a consequence I publish a totally renewed slide-deck with 203 slides. I’ve improved the IoT business model description, use-cases and technology area. I also detailed the platform side of the IoT solutions.

Feel free to reuse this content for your own conference and speak. I’m available for conference, talk … let me know.

The full PDF is available on the following link.

First steps with Helium IoT network

Helium is a crowdsourced-crypto-blockchain-Iot network working with LoRaWan. With all these trendy name, for sure they had the key elements to raise a large amount of money. That’s great for the development of this technology.

I’ve decided to write about this IoT network after an interesting talk given at the Zurich IoT meetup today (thank you CoVID-19 for making us the opportunity to reach such event, today online, bad things can get positive sometime).

Helium is a crowdsourced network. It means, like for TheThingsNetwork or Amazon Sidewalk, the infrastructure, at least the gateways part (antennas) are provided by anybody, basically you and me. That way the network deployment costs are really limited and the network have no boundaries.

Compared to TTN, Helium network is “crypto-blockchained” basically, the gateway owner are mining different challenges like registering some network change, proving the location of a gateway, cryptocurrency transactions… For this work, for maintaining the network architecture and relaying the messages, the gateway’s owner are earning HNT (Helium Network Tokens) ($2.24 each today).

Compared to TTN where you make it running for free, just because you are convinced about the sharing economy, Helium base its business model on a promise of getting some money back from your investment the gateways (+energy, communications…).

Helium is an IoT network, a LPWAN for being more precise. It relies on LoRaWan standard protocol & gateways. You need to add an Helium miner software on a backend system to make it running.

So they are looking to Uber-ize the telecom domain, at least this is what they are expecting.

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LORIX One LoRaWan gateway review

Yes, I’ve got one of these LoRaWan light saber I was looking for, since a while! For this I really thank you Wifx who helped me to get one. I know this is really unusual for them to work with blogger, so thank you for your trust. So honestly, even if I’ve been sponsored to get the device, I’m really happy to make that gateway test. As I said this gateway is one of my favorite since a while. The reason are a really compact outdoor design. It makes the difference 😉

I did not made a test previously because this have a cost, about 500€, (549CHF) this not much expensive but a bit high regrading my non-profit activity on TheThingsNetwork local deployment.

Now, I’m done telling you my life, we can see what this gateway is proposing !

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