The Internet of Things (IoT) is built from networks of devices such as sensors, gauges, and switches that are connected to the existing internet, which allows us (or computers) to monitor distant conditions and control distant processes using common internet applications as front ends. Networks of devices make possible a wide variety of critical applications in fields as diverse as medical telemetry, weather reporting, building and traffic optimization, food-quality testing, and crop and animal management. However, the end points of such networks are often mobile, physically remote, or difficult to access, and supporting these applications often requires a battery life measured in years.
The constraints of mobility and low power consumption rule out solutions using Wi-Fi or cell phone technology to connect the end points to the internet. Instead, this function can be provided by LoRa, a robust 900MHz standard for low power, low volume, secure packet data radio transmission. Wireless units implementing LoRa work within a possible radius of 10 km (about 6 miles) from an internet gateway in open country and over a mile in urban conditions. Thus, for example, it will take only 200 gateways to cover the entire city of New York. At a current price of $400 or less per gateway, this coverage means that urban areas can be served quite economically; and since, in effect, this is the distance that a sensor can be located farther on from the end of an internet backhaul connection, it also means that LoRa networks can substantially extend the reach of internet IoT connections in rural locations. LoRa works because the data rate actually needed by data acquisition networks is far lower than the 5 megabits per second or more required for consumer applications such as streaming video; data from a sensor can often be just a few bytes at a time at intervals of a minute or more. This greatly lower bandwidth requirement also means that both the data-originating devices at the end points (which can be quite numerous) and the listening radios at gateways to the internet can be small and inexpensive, or even assembled by hand from commercially available components. Since the data coming into each gateway from even a large number of sensors is small compared to current ordinary broadband capacity, gateways can be added to existing institutional or household internet connections with little or no impact on performance. Commercially, LoRa is standardized by members of the LoRaWAN Alliance. The LoRaWAN Specification, the first version of which was developed and donated chiefly by IBM and semiconductor manufacturer Semtech, is maintained by, and licensed on perpetual royalty-free terms to, the participating manufacturers of the Alliance. This jointly owned specification structure promotes competition through multiple vendor sourcing, and the specification itself serves as the basis for an open, community-owned network of things -- The Things Network (TTN).
Technically, TTN is a full open-source network software stack for setting up large numbers of sensors and routing the data to the applications (which can be in the cloud or on PCs). Socially, TTN is a grass-roots movement of communities that have organized to enable a vital public good while protecting individual ownership and control of the data communicated over the network. Unlike Wi-Fi and cellular, nodes connected via TTN require no configuration and incur no network fees. Anyone can build or buy a node (sensor, etc.) of their choice, set it up anywhere in the community, and immediately have a gateway pick up their information and route it to their application via The Things Network. TTN is rapidly providing a growing number of communities world-wide with a truly open IoT infrastructure.