Orange juices internet of things

French cellular operator Orange has settled on LoRa (Long Range) technology to build a dedicated machine-to-machine network covering all of metropolitan France. It says the network will supplement the company's existing cellular network and will roll out progressively starting early in 2016. According the company's …

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh gee!

Another Commons to abuse, i.e.have a tragedy of.

[Pascal Monett]

Smart Cities

That, right there, is The Beginning Of The End.

Mark my words.

[Mage]

Capacity?

Long range, low power so very slow. Even if the gadgets only do 1:1000 duty cycle what if a city of 100,000 has 10 per person?

So how many Things at what speed? Is is scalable at all beyond traffic lights?

[Lysenko]

Re: Capacity?

Assuming a 64bit identifier and 8 byte payload:

(((100000 x 10) x 16) / 1024) / 1024 = 15625kbps

...taking your 1:1000 duty cycle and (for no particular reason) ZigBee @868MHz data rates of 40kbps:

(15625 / 1000) / 40 = 0.39

There is a lot of useful work you can get done with numbers like that, particularly since the above is assuming that all 100000 people are connected to the same tower (impossible) and that there is no mesh store\forward or backbone links (absurd).

It is refreshing how much useful data you can get through a low power radio link when you don't have to account for cat photos, XML or its portly rather than morbidly obese cousin, JSON.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the frequency, Ken?

After much curious searching, I finally found a page that actually mentioned what frequency band this will be using - the 868MHz licence-free band. (http://www.usine-digitale.fr/article/objets-connectes-bouygues-telecom-va-deployer-son-reseau-sur-la-france-entiere.N321266)

Hopefully it won't interfere with the old wireless headphones nearby :)