Cisco Is Abandoning the LoRaWAN Space With No Lifeboat For IoT Customers 9
Cisco is exiting the LoRaWAN market for IoT device connectivity, with no migration plans for customers. "LoRaWAN is a low power, wide area network specification, specifically designed to connect devices such as sensors over relatively long distances," notes The Register. "It is built on LoRa, a form of wireless communication that uses spread spectrum modulation, and makes use of license-free sub-gigahertz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) radio bands. The tech is overseen by the LoRa Alliance." From the report: Switchzilla made this information public in a notice on its website announcing the end-of-sale and end-of-life dates for Cisco LoRaWAN. The last day customers will be able to order any affected products will be January 1, 2025, with all support ceasing by the end of the decade. The list includes Cisco's 800 MHz and 900 MHz LoRaWAN Gateways, plus associated products such as omni-directional antennas and software for the Gateways and Interface Modules. If anyone was in any doubt, the notification spells it out: "Cisco will be exiting the LoRaWAN space. There is no planned migration for Cisco LoRaWAN gateways."
Re: (Score:2)
Probably agriculture, things like soil moisture sensors, irrigation control gates, silo methane detectors, stuff that needs to run for months without being charged but only get queried once in a blue moon. There may be other uses, but that's what I'm aware of.
Re:What are common applications for LoRa? (Score:5, Informative)
This is really the point. I'm in the IoT industry and more specifically Smart Home because that is where the money is. A few years ago, the promise of IoT (Internet Of Everything - woohoo!) was that you'd be able to hook up everything to the Internet and get data from it. "Data is the new oil!" was the mantra. All you needed was to come up with a radio technology to enable it. Semtec had LoRa and built an alliance and org around it and vendors dutifully brought out radios, receivers, dev boards, all to support it. The mobile wireless guys came out with Narrow Band LTE - user the gard band of LTE and make it cheap! But.... yeah, you've guessed it, technology in search of a business model. It all _sounds_ like it should be able to make money, right? Just think of all those farmers wanting rainfall data on their crops, or pipeline makers wanting acoustic readings of their pipes crossing the tundra, or um, home owners wanting sensors all over their house, or electricity meters, and, er., well, all of these are good applications, but they are onesie-twosies and super low volume. Compare it to light bulbs. Tens of thousands of lights are sold every week in the US. For some of those applications, you'd be lucky to get a few hundred deployed, and yet, the effort and cost to do so, would run into the $100k's just in labor alone. I'm not surprised that Cisco is dropping out. I bet they sold, phew, maybe hundreds of their gateways! Perhaps they were really good at sales and sold thousands! You get the idea.
The radio tech does still live on, and is used as one of the sub-gig radios of choice, but the whole LoraWAN thing is dead IMO. No money in it.
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No points today, but mod up.
Thanks for a meaningful and insightful comment from someone who knows about the subject.
Re: What are common applications for LoRa? (Score:2)
I wouldn't say it's dead, but companies like Cisco outprice themselves from the market.
The applications are limited, but could still be valuable to users like monitoring water levels in wells and send alarms when it's too low or too high.
Low bandwidth long distance multiple measurement points data where it's too expensive to have a 4G/5G modem at every point and WiFi is insufficient.
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Meshtastic uses it, so you can use it for "SMS" off grid. A limitation is in the gateway space though... but the "no money in it" issue is a factor.
The IoT protocols (Score:2)
Bluetooth / BLE - supported by smart phones. Limited application layer, limited range.
z-wave - decent network layer, good application layer, used to have a very good industry trade group. Almost all hubs though required the hub maker and the device maker to have communicated before the device could be fully controlled by the hub. Not