The Things Conference 2025: A Decade of Growth and a Shift Toward Diversity in IoT

TheThingsConference took place once again in Amsterdam, marking what should have been its 8th edition. This year, however, the event carried a special significance: it celebrated the 10-year anniversary of TheThingsNetwork, now a yearly reference point for IoT professionals.

Traditionally, the conference has been strongly oriented toward the LoRaWan ecosystem, providing a deep dive into the technical and industrial advances surrounding it. But this year marked a shift. The organizers deliberately chose to broaden the scope, opening the stage to a wider range of IoT technologies and ecosystems. The result was an edition that felt more diverse, more dynamic, and undeniably more engaging.

With a larger audience and a wider array of perspectives, this year’s sessions offered a rich mix of technical depth and ecosystem insights. For me, the event was not only about the talks themselves, but also about taking a step back to reflect on the IoT market as a whole: how it has evolved over the past year, where it seems to be heading, and what genuinely new ideas and technologies are emerging.

As usual, this article is my way of revisiting those two intense days—sharing my key takeaways, my impressions of the conference, and my thoughts on the shifting landscape of IoT.

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IoT slide deck 2024-09 Update

Here is the update of my IoT slide collection, which now approaches 400 slides that you are free to reuse. In this new edition, you will find technical elements on Meshtastic, Mioty, DePin, LoRa updates throughout, and a few introductory slides on blockchains. However, on this point, my new deck, published a few days ago, is more relevant.

As usual, to go further, you can find video content on my Youtube channel, like my new MooC about Block Chain and my IoT MooC (long version) posted this year.

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Critical Analysis of the Meshtastic Protocol

Meshtastic is a mesh protocol (peer-to-peer, network by proximity) based on LoRa technology. LoRa is not LoRaWan, just as WiFi is not IP. It is therefore possible to use LoRa for networks without infrastructure.

Meshtastic was designed for communication outside of any public infrastructure, with a survivalist spirit of autonomous and (more or less) secure communication.

Due to its structure, it is difficult to estimate the size of such a community, but the map seems to indicate that more than 10,000 nodes are currently active. However, it seems that there are actually around 40,000 active nodes, with strong participation from the global ham radio community. In practice, the network is composed of clusters of nodes communicating locally with each other and expanding as clusters become visible to one another. In reality, without linking infrastructure, it won’t be possible to connect from one cluster to another but some MQTT relay features exists.

The use and development of the network require very few resources, as simple DIY nodes based on widely available devkits, such as the T-beam, are sufficient. The user interface works via a mobile application interacting through Bluetooth. The investment is just a few dozen euros. In a previous Meshtastic blog post, I detailed its implementation with small LoRa modules.

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Meshtastic another way to use LoRa

You may be familiar with LoRa, not that girl, but the LOng RAnge communication solution that is used for long-distance, low-power point-to-point communications. It was invented by the Grenoble-based company Cycleo in 2009 and later sold to the semiconductor giant Semtech.

You might have heard more about it in its usage with an infrastructured network: LoRaWan, which allows public or private networks to connect thousands of sensors. In this blog post, I am going to talk about another implementation of LoRa, this time in a mesh architecture named Meshtastic. Multiple mesh, LoRa based solution are rising, this is one of them.

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