Sharing economy meets home networks

So… what is this ? Some of us will remember the initiative of FON, back in 2006, which attempted to turn the WiFi technology into a pervasive collaborative network. Martín Varsavsky thought that using the millions of home WiFi access points just for home networks was an incredible waste of resources. A perfect city network was at hand at virtually no incremental cost : just share ! Unfortunately WiFi collaborative networks didn’t take off to the anticipated scale : the WiFi technology wasn’t really designed for sharing, and the limited range, about 20 to 40m in urban areas, required mass adoption to cover full cities.

But recent LPWAN technologies, such as LoRaWAN, do not have these issues. They are designed for long range : experiments have shown that an average radius of 400 to 500m for an indoor picocell is realistic in big cities. They are designed for sharing : unlike traditional mesh networks or WiFi, all LoRaWAN antennas collaborate and form a seamless network. If 10 antennas are in range of a sensor, all 10 antennas will be used to decode each frame from the sensor, dramatically improving Quality of Service, and reducing Packet Error Rate. Even better, the collaboration technology is completely dynamic and will automatically “adopt” and leverage any new picocell, and even works across collaborative networks by leveraging a standardized peering protocol (LoRa Alliance Back-End interface 1.x).

The end result is that full coverage of a city may be obtained by deploying a surprisingly low number of picocells. Many companies can deploy such picocells at a ridiculously low incremental cost : internet providers (though new LPWAN add-on board to triple play modems) and smart speaker companies are the most obvious ones. Telcos and cable operators will probably not like to see big portals building a strategic over-the-top community network on top of their fixed broadband infrastructure without reaction, so you can expect smart speakers to shoot the new collaborative LPWAN feature first, followed by Telcos and cable operators.

In rich economies, you will soon be able to track your pets, connect alarm systems, get a better parcel delivery tracking system, so this is good news. For the emerging economies, this is a game changer.

Take the example of Ho-Chi-Min city, 2090km2.

With a traditional smart home model, say with a Zigbee transceiver in each home, costs are linear, so there are no economies of scale, and it is hard to provide the feature for less than about 5-10USD per home. Also the use cases remain scoped to home only, limiting revenue opportunities.