fieldtester.io

The Things Network

The open community network, its fair use policy, gateways and integrations.

What TTN is

The Things Network is an open, worldwide LoRaWAN network that a community builds and runs: private individuals, associations, municipalities, schools and companies set up gateways and share them. Anyone operating a device uses all the community's gateways free of charge.

The software behind it is called The Things Stack. It is developed by the Dutch company The Things Industries, which runs TTN and also offers the same software as a paid service for private networks. The community edition runs in regional clusters, for Europe eu1.cloud.thethings.network.

In Switzerland several local TTN communities run gateways and organise meetups.

Fair use policy

So that the shared network works for everyone, TTN adds rules of its own:

  • at most 30 seconds of uplink airtime per device and day,
  • at most 10 downlinks per device and day.
486SF7265SF8145SF980SF1036SF1120SF12Packets per day within 30 s of airtime (11-byte payload)TTN Fair Use Policy: at most 30 s of uplink airtime per device and day.
At SF7, 30 seconds are enough for almost 490 field tester packets a day; at SF12 for 20.

A field tester gets a reply to every uplink. For a site survey or a measurement drive that is common. As a device that sends all the time it is not suited to TTN.

Gateways

  • A gateway connects to TTN through LoRa Basics Station (recommended, encrypted) or the older Semtech UDP packet forwarder.
  • The location of a gateway is entered in the console and can be made public. Only then can a field tester calculate the distance to the gateway.
  • Through the Packet Broker, TTN and other LoRaWAN networks exchange packets. A device on TTN can thus also be received through gateways of other networks if their operators allow it.

Integrations

An application receives the data of its devices through:

  • Webhooks: TTN calls an address for every packet (this is how fieldtester.io works),
  • MQTT: the application subscribes to the data,
  • storage and cloud integrations for other services.

A payload formatter can turn the raw bytes into readable values directly in TTN.

If a webhook fails repeatedly, TTN can mark it as "unhealthy" and stop calling it for a while. In the console under Integrations → Webhooks this shows in its status.