We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networks
Worth noting that the maximum bitrate of the base LoRa encoding is not going to replace your cellphone anytime soon, even for a fantasy re-hash of the text-based Internet that this article suggests.<p>I believe the maximum speed of LoRaWAN on 900Mhz spectrum is a blazing 27 kbps (that's bits), so the cited 80Kb/s in the linked article for Sidewalk-to-IP communication is several orders of magnitude higher and must contain a lot of (unsurprising) overhead.<p>LoRa is good for applications where it used, like meter monitoring, control systems (oilfield etc.), and RC airplane control (R9/Crossfire/Ghost). It could certainly be used for the proposed motion detection and lighting use cases. With modern codecs, you could maybe complete 1-2 voice calls at a time over it, maybe. But my guess is that Amazon's play here is "smart home without the WiFi configuration," not "replace your cell phone."<p>It's not going to replace your cell phone data plan.