As you probably know one of the main issues with IoT is connectivity. In a home or small environment, WiFi, BlueTooth, or ZigBee work exceptionally but how to manage long-range connectivity?
I’m trying to develop a system for city-wide monitoring of people’s movements. Basically, in Italy, we are forced by law to check the number of attendees to events and we have events outdoor that can be as big as a whole city. As an example, you may know of Lucca Comics and Games.
In this kind of scenario, BT, WiFi, and ZigBee all fail short for in urban environment they cannot assure more than a few 100 meters of connectivity. Of course, mesh networks can help but why adapt something that was studied for other applications when somebody created a wireless protocol exactly for that?
LoRa (Long Range) is characterized by connectivity up to 15 km (in line of sight) but they say it’s 5 km in highly urbanized environments. Of course, it does that at the expense of a very low data throughput.
Problem is I’ve never used LoRa and I didn’t really know how it performed until a few days ago. Question is, has anybody here tested it?
