LoRa
termnetworkingISP & telecom
A long-range, low-power radio technique (Semtech's chirp spread spectrum) and, via LoRaWAN (the LoRa Alliance's network specification), an LPWAN architecture: kilometers of range, years of battery, bytes of payload, gateways forwarding whatever they hear.
The network for whispers - sensors that must live for years on a coin cell.
LoRa takes the opposite bet from Wi-Fi, and understanding the trade explains everything else about it. It uses a spread spectrum modulation in sub-gigahertz unlicensed bands to achieve kilometres of range and years of battery life, and it pays for that with data rates measured in hundreds of bits per second.
That budget shapes what you can build. A sensor sending a temperature reading every fifteen minutes fits comfortably; anything resembling a stream does not. The lower the data rate, the further the signal reaches, so range and throughput are directly exchangeable per message, and the adaptive schemes that pick this automatically are optimizing that exact trade.
The constraint people meet late is regulatory duty cycle. Unlicensed sub-gigahertz bands limit how much of each hour a device may transmit, which caps message frequency independently of anything in your design, and the limits differ by region. A device that works in testing and fails in production is often one whose retry logic is exceeding what the band permits, which is a compliance ceiling rather than a bug in the radio.
Also known as: lorawan, lpwan