CAT now using ‘LoRaWAN’ for free Phuket Wi-Fi spots

[rooster59]

CAT now using ‘LoRaWAN’ for free Phuket Wi-Fi spots 

Suthicha Sirirat

 

 

PHUKET: CAT Telecom yesterday announced that they are now using “LoRaWAN” (Long-Range Wide Area Network) media access control (MAC) protocol for the island’s 1,000 Wi-Fi hotpots.

 

The announcement was made at a meeting held at the Bhukitta Grand Ballroom on Phang Nga Rd in Phuket Town yesterday (Apr 20) which was led by the Minister of Digital Economy and Society Dr Pichet Durongkaveroj.

 

President of CAT Telecom Col Sappachai Huwanant said, “We saw a good opportunity to introduce LoRaWAN to Phuket as this will help develop the island into becoming a Smart City. And I am pleased to announce that this is now ready to use at all 1,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots across the island.”

Full story: https://www.thephuketnews.com/cat-now-using-lorawan-for-free-phuket-wi-fi-spots-66857.php#Jvefw4vjvQtm0m1T.97

 

 

-- © Copyright Phuket News 2018-04-21

[Guest]

Interesting.

 

  If I understood this correctly, LoraWan or Lora? is truly meant only for IoT devices allowing them to update information to the internet. Sounds to me that more suitable places to host the LoraWan antennas would be at the top of the mobile network towers, not at the often low placed Wifi hotspots. 

 

  This technology is usable for example weather stations, which send their logged data to the server for example once in 10 minutes. Another feasible application could be monitoring the water level on home watertanks. The network uplink is highly unreliable, so that it applications must be ok with lost 5-85% of the data (it doesn't matter if the data is not updates for an hour or two in this case). 

 

  The protocol is 1-way communication from the IoT devices to the internet. Unlike Wifi, which works 2-ways, allowing us to browse the internet etc. 

 

  Lora frequencies differ quite a lot depending of the continent where the OSI layer 2 sub protocol is being used. The uplink server broadcasts a header ping to the IoT devices with information of used spectrum once every 2 seconds. 

 

  Interesting technology. Does anyone have more information or ideas of potential use cases or practical usage?

 

Further reading:

https://www.link-labs.com/blog/use-cases-and-considerations-for-lorawan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/#terminology

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5038744/

Edited April 22, 2018 by Guest

[Stefanix]

Quite misleading article. LoRaWAN is certainly not FOR WiFi hotspots. Probably CAT is using those locations for the LoRaWAN gateway installations. Behind this is a cooperation with SK Telecom and a first application seems to be vehicle tracking:

https://www.telecomasia.net/content/sk-telecom-cat-launch-iot-network-thailand

Would be interesting to know the exact purpose of this vehicle tracking.

 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

I love these local media articles where they spend 10 pghs prattling on about some subject... and never do actually tell the readers what it means for them in practical terms, or what the actual thing will do different or better than what came before.

 

Kind of like an article announcing the results of the latest seawater pollution readings and quoting all kinds of government officials on the subject, but then the article doesn't actually provide the actual readings for any specific locations.

 

It's talking about something, without actually telling you what the something is.

 

Edited April 22, 2018 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[arithai12]

"as this will help develop the island into becoming a Smart City "

 

Smart City... start maybe with public transportation?