Carrier Grade LoRaWAN® Gateways Save Network Operators Millions

Carrier Grade LoRaWAN® Gateways Key Parameters Many Telecommunication Engineers have been trained on or are aware of Carrier Grade requirements introduced in the late 1990s to ensure that telecom equipment is developed and tested to mission-critical standards as people, businesses, and government livelihoods and operations depend on them. The initial Carrier Grade requirements were focused on public wired and later wireless telecom infrastructures. Later the same Carrier Grade requirements were applied to the critical infrastructures such as VoIP and the Internet at large. The classic telecom...

Below are listed the most important Gateway design areas and KPIs every developer should consider while designing and testing LoRaWAN Gateways. By the same token, every LoRaWAN operator and enterprise should seek to verify the Gateway KPIs and performance before deploying them if they intend to operate them for 8-10 years without significant downtime, numerous issues, site visits, poor Radio performance, all leading to the operator significant yearly cost increase, or outright equipment replacements well before its planned time. 1. Does the Network with the deployed Gateways support minimum 5...

by the global cellular operators and will they support operator LTE releases for the next 5-10 years? It is for this reason vendors producing outdoor LoRaWAN Gateways should use 4G CAT-6 Modems to ensure the optimal LTE Rx and Tx performance with MIMO and LTE operator long term support with LTE upgrades to Releases 14, 15 and 16. 10. Does the Gateway have all of its external interfaces ESD, and Lighting protected? Does the Gateway meet country and regional Regulatory and Safety Requirements (Safety requirements could carry criminal liability and void operator commercial insurance if the Gateway...

Gateways. There are some LoRaWAN® operators that had to fix or replace their LoRaWAN Gateways only after 1-3 years of operation. It is important to note that a Gateway replacement cost, in most cases, is more expensive than the Gateway cost itself as is provided further in this paper. In addition, the incremental costs due to the LoRaWAN Gateway suboptimal performance and low reliability will further increase the yearly operator network cost from minimum 25% to well over 100%. Figure 2 indicates how most outdoor LoRaWAN Gateways are deployed and the telecom towers they are mounted on. The installation...

Table 1: Typical Simplified LoRaWAN Network Cost Numbers The yearly cost to deploy and operate a LoRaWAN® network, for a city similar size and density to Calgary, is estimated $1.38 million as provided in Table 1. This cost assumes all equipment, initial deployment, and yearly operating costs. It is important to note in real life the total yearly cost is higher for most public operators, what makes the argument for high quality Gateways even stronger. In Table 1 we assumed all deployed Gateways meet telecom Carrier Grade performance KPI and specifications previously discussed in this paper. In...

Just to show how dependent the total LoRaWAN network cost is on the Gateway performance itself, let’s reduce the effective LoRaWAN Gateway radius due to poorer Radio performance and at the same time increase the number of site visits due to poorer LoRaWAN Gateway reliability (alarms, failures, Gateway replacement free of charge, manual SW Upgrades, and other cost drivers) and incremental labor costs. Table 2 below clearly indicates how sensitive the LoRaWAN® network cost is to the Gateway Radio performance and its reliability. If the LoRaWAN Gateways radius is reduced by 30%, what is insignificant...

real customer impact even and the incremental yearly cost to run such a POC network is very low. There even could be a good reason to do so - one could procure lower cost LoRaWAN Gateways, or a complete solution, to test a use case, conduct customer demos, or run the network while still selecting or negotiating with other Gateway vendors. In most cases, a trial or POC network does not cost a lot to deploy and does not put significant risk on the operator or enterprise future business. However, if the operator or enterprise deploys a large commercial LoRaWAN network with 100s or even 1000s of...