IoTNet

IoTNet is a grassroots movement to empower communities to share bandwidth among themselves where every additional gateway added results in an exponential benefit to the whole, in accordance with Metcalfe's Law.

People want a safe, secure, and opt-in anonymous Internet. Facebook users have left and joined Diaspora, now Comcast and Verizon customers can roll their own solution by just putting an IoTNet gateway in their window.

Primarily dense urban environments on rev 1, but rev 2 will support longer range. We currently support the greater Boston area, see   https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/c/Boston  and http://ttn.mit.edu 

We have gateway devices, that we are currently giving away, that will join, anonymously if you want, to the alternet. This will effectively remove the digital divide by bypassing the duopoly of phone and cable companies offering internet access. And these nodes will remain up during and after natural disasters to be able to function as an emergency network.

Our base software is the TTN which creates an IoTNet in Boston. Our value-add is the ad hoc code we use on top of it. But our real innovation is creating LBS for passive devices. Now when you get on to the T at Kendall Square, your Nest thermostat will go up because you have set it to do that. You don't have to worry about the plumbing making that possible. IoTNet is taking care of that. 

We use LoRaWAN on 900Mhz (a license-free spectrum). LoRaWAN is a Long Range Wide Area Network protocol based on LoRa modulation, a type of Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation. LoRa modulation is designed for extremely long range, yet low power radio communication in the sub-GHz ISM band. The basic infrastructure of LoRaWAN consists of nodes or end devices which send data through routers or gateways to a backend server. Then, using an API which connects to this server, devices can respond to or log this information.

Our solution does 2 things well. It offers a net neutral alternet during good weather and an emergency network after a natural disaster. 

Communications can be scarce in remote areas with no internet connections as well as within regions that have experienced natural disasters and power outages. Solar Power and distributed networks go hand in hand. The justifications for standalone RF repeaters is lack of access to power (in rural areas in particular) and most importantly to bring things up quickly after natural disasters when infrastructure is damaged and “house current” is in short supply. 

If there were a distributed network of cheap, low power, battery and solar powered gateways that communicate with radio providing a long range solution for maximum / optimum data transfer that would create a solution for this problem. This would substantially leverage our IoTNet efforts on the communications side, and our power support systems that work on the uninterrupted power provision side.

About 100 today (in the Boston area)...  but a couple of thousand when we finish the first deployment this year. 5000 by this time next year.

We are using a similar deployment model to the CPI which was a project we worked on years ago and is a model for Muniwireless deployments worldwide. We will emplace and empower our gateways at city housing projects and then spread out from there. In 3 years we expect to have all of the dead zones covered and will be able to stiutch together the TTN zones so that we have unified coverage along the eastern seaboard.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/Departments/informationtechnology/CPI

If Comcast sees a valuable revenue stream here, they could likely do a national fielding better than us, but not cheaper. And certainly not net neutral.

3

There are very few teams working in this space. We are the local and possibly national experts in TTN coding. We have added to the open source community where we needed to to grow the install base.

We may have to partner with Comcast. They are doing a nationwide rollout of LoRaWAN. Not because they see a business there but just as a hedge against TTN developers like us. We are currently the largest TTN in the US, although quite small compared to any EU deployment, but we are in the process of giving away 50 gateways to broaden the footprint.

Our first proof of concept location would be a post-event geographical location such as Puerto Rico post-hurricane. That would be a grant-funded installation but it would be part of the infrastructure that would grow after it's value has been demonstrated. At that point we would be a B to B and B to C provider.

For our current phase, while we are demoing functionality, we are relying on public domains techs to keep our costs down. But we will pivot to an  Entrepreneur Support Model . Customers (municipalities mostly) will pay for the gateways to be in place in advance of a natural disaster.

We are frustrated by the reception we are getting at traditional funding sources like VCs. We see this an an infrastructure buildout with profound social implications. And we need to enlargen and diversify our discussion base. More social entities, more business entities.

Organizations who have a track record with public network fieldings.