At my company we're looking at building a new product that would use a LoRaWAN backbone. I'm looking at the various network server offerings and their tradeoffs, and am interested in seeing if anyone here has experience with those.
To add some context, we're estimating that at full scale, we'd be looking at a private network running around 10,000 devices spread across 500 locations in various countries, with each location operating 1 or 2 gateways.
So far some solutions I've found interesting:
To add some context, we're estimating that at full scale, we'd be looking at a private network running around 10,000 devices spread across 500 locations in various countries, with each location operating 1 or 2 gateways.
So far some solutions I've found interesting:
- The obvious contenter is The Things Stack. The cloud offering looks like a nice, out of the box and low maintenance solution. However the price seems a little steep. A secondary option would be to self host the open source version, although it's apparently not as full-featured. What features aren't included isn't super clear though.
- AWS IOT Core seems to also offer a full featured LNS. At a first glace the price seems very reasonable, but as with all things AWS, pricing can get out of control super quickly if you aren't careful. As far as maintenance goes, I have no idea how much more/less it would be compared to something like TTS. We also try to avoid AWS products when possible for various reasons.
- The absolute cheapest in terms of straight hosting costs would probably be running an open source stack like Chirpstack on a VPS or Kubernetes deployment. Obviously we would have to take care of maintenance ourselves, and if I'm being honest I'm not really sure how much exactly that entails.
- I'm interested in hearing if you have been successfully using other alternatives as well.
