I added my own gateway in a town in the UK of about 25,000 people, mainly as a learning exercise and also to use a few devices myself, and with no known public gateways.
I paid attention to the live gateway logs and no traffic apart from my own few devices, and then I would see the occasional join request from what appear to be smart water meters (a Google on the Join EUI 0007813700000001 found it was for a common brand of water meter) with those join requests going unanswered.
About 6 weeks ago I noticed by chance in the live log an uplink with the device address starting 13, on checking this appears to be for the SENET network. Am I correct in thinking that these uplinks are then passed to SENET? It only seemed to be that one node for a while, then in the last couple of weeks the list has grown quite a bit. From watching the live gateway log I’ve seen 20 unique uplinks from devices starting with this address. The uplink counter for most are 14 - 16, some are much less, showing these are indeed new devices.
I do know the local water authority is moving to smart meters for leakage detection and better billing, and this is via a partnership with Netmore that I believe has bought SENET. Maybe they are just getting around to upgrading meters in the area? I would assume Netmore/SENET will have installed their own private gateways, or in the process of doing so, and I’m either picking up the packets as well, or they haven’t got very good coverage yet. Given most of the devices are using SF12, with a few using SF11, if they have their own gateways they aren’t giving good coverage to some of the nodes, hence they are shouting as loud as they can.
I also see join requests from two nodes using a developer Join UI 90DFFB0000000000 that goes unanswered, and I wonder what these nodes are and who has abandoned them.
Just found it interesting how the airwaves were filling up.
Don’t forget we’re a bit on the fringe of the LoRaWAN ecosystem here. The TTN infrastructure is effectively provided by TTI rather than the other way round.
What you’re seeing isn’t so much “devices arriving” locally, but your gateway picking up traffic from devices that will use whichever network/gateway gives the best coverage.
TTI peers with other networks, which is why you’re seeing those device address ranges. Some of that traffic will belong to networks like Senet/Netmore and is just being heard by your gateway, not necessarily served by it.
Given the high SFs you’re seeing, it probably does suggest those devices are on the edge of coverage and your gateway is one of the ones hearing them.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve kept an eye on the live gateway list and so far I’ve seen 56 uplinks from unique devices, these mostly start with 13 so SENET, the majority have frame counters of 13 to 18, and seem to update twice a day, putting them as coming online about a week ago, so these are new. I can only think they are updating water meters street by street, but not see anything near by happening. We do have a new ring road opening soon, so I wondered if it might be related to that and they’ve added sensors all along it, as I’m amazed that water meters in the ground under metal covers would allow me to hear so many as I’m not in a dense housing area, so to hear 56 at the last count they must spread out a long way.
I’m also seeing around 48 devices attempting to join but they don’t seem to ever join anything, I’ve always seen these trickle past in the live gateway view but never counted them up before.
Had a blip of about 20 confirmed uplinks stream past in a matter of seconds, for two addresses starting 00 which seems to be an experimental address, so someone having a play about with something.
Just find it fascinating that it was really quiet here at the start of the year when I added my gateway, and thinking perhaps LoRaWAN had had its day and other tech was in favour, so I’m please to see that isn’t the case, and if I’m helping to provide some coverage, I’m quite happy doing that.
Just an edit, I found a post on the towns Facebook page asking to rent a bit of roof space to install LoRaWAN gateways, linking to here https://www.smartmeters.tech/. I don’t know if it would packet broker elsewhere so I could use it for my own devices and then remove my own gateway? It could be I’m already providing some coverage then, be nice to get paid for it.
Why would one want to give an unknown undeclared company (without digging and investigation!) - I know people can be sheep! - my name, address, contact details in phone # email, etc. if they are not willing to openly & transparently share their own details - who, company house reg # vat info. full contact details etc. ……just saying!
Sounds like following the Sigfox local operator consumer incentive model from a few years back….at one point they had some 3k5 GW’s sat up in a warehouse in Gemini area North Warrington just waiting for deployment sites. Stopped paying people who signed up quite quickly after launch of scheme if I recall correctly!
I think that website (smartmeters.tech) is just an individual who is hoping to collect a ÂŁ50 referral fee maybe and saw an opportunity to forward on contact details? Granted it was scarce on details that website, and I would go direct to Netmore, that seems safer.
