The current target date for the sunset of 2G in South Africa is 2023, and 3G is to be sunset by 2025/2026. Phasing out 2G and 3G seems like a non-event, since 3G has been a useless technology for the last few years with the advent of 4G and 5G.
Edge and 3G only allow the user a minor speed advantage nowadays as the networks are congested and oversubscribed. The logic follows then that 2G and 3G bandwidth can be better utilised by getting users onto 5G networks. So sunsetting them and using the space for better technologies seems like a good idea.
The reason for using GPRS was mainly for cost saving because it is the lowest bandwidth available and the lower cost per megabyte of data. However, sunsetting 2G, in which GPRS also goes away, will be a calamity for many companies, as most of their monitoring equipment currently uses GPRS to communicate their status via GPRS. So once GPRS is turned off, how will these devices be able to send their data to their backend servers?
In future, 5G will be able to handle a lot more data and at a much faster data rate; however, the data packets being sent by these monitoring devices, in general, are small packets just providing the status of the various monitored gadgets.
From the advent of automated responses from the Prancing Pony, the first computer-connected vending machine set up at a university, the lowly vending machine is one of the devices that supplies the best use case for IOT. Once the row of cold drinks or whatever the vending machine is dispensing is depleted or sold out, there is usually some switch, button or other indicator that gets set to show that this specific cold drink is out of stock. This data that gets sent back to the supplier is usually one bit of an 8-bit/1-byte payload. So one bit could indicate with a one or a zero whether it is still stocked or empty.
This 1 byte of data is so cheap to send that it is negligible. However, due to the baseline cost for a 5G or 4G data bundle, it might be a high price to tell a backend server that there is no Coke left in the machine.
Of course, there is still the promise of narrow band IOT (NB-IOT), so this might be where most of these units will eventually send their data. Now, the catch is that these GPRS devices will need to be replaced with new modems capable of sending data via NB-IOT, which uses a different connection mechanism and protocol to transmit data. Transitioning to new technology seems great until one realises that some devices that send data back to servers are battery operated. This means that a SIM-based device will have a much shorter life than one of the other low powered wide area networks such as LoRaWAN.
LoRaWAN will be the best technology able to serve this market over and above the cellular mechanisms adequately, and it's a great way to send smaller payloads of data such as this. It does mean that one still has to build up a network capable of sending this data, which in South Africa works on a frequency of 868MHz. So it means setting up a LoRaWAN gateway that will read the data from the battery operated LoRaWAN device and then send it to a LoRaWAN network server, which will pass it on to the backend server.
LoRaWAN devices are typically battery operated and will last for many years, sending status data of switches and sensors like temperature and humidity at regular intervals.
One obvious benefit to using LoRa is that it takes one LoRaWAN gateway to cover the same area as 10 cellphone towers. The distance in the open air – or line of sight – is anywhere from 10 kilometres to upwards of 40 kilometres. Each gateway can handle more than 1 000 different devices connecting to it. This is one of the cheapest ways to send messages to remote servers or backend applications.
Suppose you have many devices in one area. In that case, you can put up your own LoRaWAN gateways, like the Milesight UG65 or UG67 gateways, and then use TTN – The Things Network, or Chirpstack open source LNS – LoRaWAN Network Server, to forward the data to your backend server.
There has never been a better time for LoRaWAN than today. The sunsetting of 2G and 3G makes it a necessity.
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