7 votes

Sony built an IoT chip with a sixty mile range

2 comments

  1. [2]
    guywithhair
    (edited )
    Link
    Very cool, thanks for sharing. As someone who is soon-to-be starting graduate school with Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) as a focus area, I love reading about this sort of stuff, especially...

    Very cool, thanks for sharing. As someone who is soon-to-be starting graduate school with Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) as a focus area, I love reading about this sort of stuff, especially how it works. The article mentions its in Japan for now, but if it actually takes off, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up using it. Then again, its proprietary so we'll if that affects its ability to get traction. LoRaWAN seems to be doing pretty well, and that's a proprietary standard

    Obviously I'm biased, but I am much more interested to see how this works out compared to 5G. The latter may be more useful to consumers, but I think LPWAN as more interesting implications for industrial and other large-scale applications. Any big sensor network isn't going to work if you have to replace the battery for thousands of devices after a few months, and communications require more power than any computations you'd be doing on a small sensor.

    Edit: One thing I'm curious about is how much a reliance on GNSS for time synchronization is going to effect power consumption. I know GPS in general is power-hungry, but not sure the extent of that when only a sync is needed. Nonetheless, that'll still require adequate line-of-sight I would think.

    I'll have to keep up with this, glad I came across this post!

    2 votes
    1. Lawrencium265
      Link Parent
      I've been toying with the idea of starting an agricultural/industrial iot company selling LoRa based sensors for remote areas. I see a lot of talk about 5g and whatever but most iot needs a few...

      I've been toying with the idea of starting an agricultural/industrial iot company selling LoRa based sensors for remote areas. I see a lot of talk about 5g and whatever but most iot needs a few bits of bandwidth at a time and very low power consumption and I haven't heard of anyone providing realistic solutions to real problems.

      3 votes