Cisco Is Abandoning the LoRaWAN Space With No Lifeboat For IoT Customers 13
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."
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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.
Cisco introduced devices ~2018 (Score:2)
Here's a cisco blog entry about Cisco promoting LoRaWAN from Oct 2018 and Wikipedia tracking the specification back to 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://blogs.cisco.com/govern... [cisco.com]
October 29, 2018
IoT Evolves: the coming of long range WAN
Michael Harttree
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:3)
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.
Vending machines in Japan (Score:1)
They keep track of their inventory and send those details over a LoRa network back to the distributors.
The IoT protocols (Score:5, Informative)
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 a requirement of the standard but the way everyone did it. Now controlled by the Connected Standards Alliance.
Zigbee - good networking, good application layer with the by far the most defined functionality. Most interoperability of all standards. Device makers and coordinators (hubs) need never even know about each other before the device can be controlled. The Zigbee Alliance was the worst trade group imaginable. Documentation extremely hard to read to know what the protocol does, testing and certification a pain. Alliance would regularly throw device makers under the bus. Zigbee Alliance is now the Connected Standards Alliance
Thread / Matter over Thread - Currently has the most hype and marketing. Thread is a beautiful networking protocol that solves a problem no end user wanted solved. (Thread effectively puts all devices on the internet which means all device makers have their devices call home and try to have them controlled by their servers. It allows vendor lock in. ) Matter is essentially the ZigBee application layer but with most of the faults of ZigBee fixed. Unfortunately standard is now in bureaucratic hell. It is getting bloated fast, with multiple ways to do the same thing being added and the number of features still only a fraction of what ZigBee supports. There is also a degree of disregard for device makers in favor of companies that want to control the devices. Investors believe there is more money in controlling the devices so there are more voting member trying to control the devices than make them. (note zigbee 2.0, the predecessor to Matter, was plague by this problem). Matter is developed by the Connected Standards Alliance.
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You can always have a local server controlling the devices, on the same network, No internet access even required.
Even, you could have a private internet-facing server to control devices at different sites. Or have something form of tunnelling to connect different sites.
On the device side, you can pair a wifi modem with a micro controller, or even use something like the ESP32, where your application code can live next to the WIFi/IP
Wonder if this is fallout from the NextNav thing (Score:2)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]