Well that’s cool! In practice, I believe there are portions of the protocol that are patented, so do some research before using this commercially.
That being said, LoRa is a really interesting protocol. Very adjustable to tune for a use case, somewhat novel modulation scheme. LoRaWAN on top of it is well designed. I implemented it from scratch once and was generally impressed with the design. Easy enough to implement and does a very good job and minimizing how long the radio (both Tx and Rx) need to be on.
"Software patentability is limited in a lot of places"
In Europe, the new Unified Patent Court (UPC) will probably rubberstamp them, using the "as such" and the "technical effect" loopholes. Without any appeal possible to the European Court of Justice.
Sorry, replied to one of the child posts. It's not a software patent, it's a radio modulation patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160094269A1/en and I'm not really that confident that it would be struck down if challenged; from what I'm remembering from digging into it, it is actually a pretty novel form of modulation that has some nice properties for the specific application they're using it for.
I appreciate where your head is at, but I don't think it's very likely that a court is going to agree with you. Contrast to the canonical "One-Click Shopping" patent, this patent covers radio waves of a specific type that you'll be producing and not just an abstract business process. Just because there's a way to violate that patent by writing code for a programmable radio doesn't mean that it's a software patent.
Heck, in the middle ground between "one-click shopping" and LoRa modulation, you have things like audio and video codecs. These are primarily math-based patents, but they have had pretty broad patent protection for a long time compared to more abstract business-process/software patents. Where this might get interesting specifically for LoRa is that France is one of the rare places that doesn't seem to recognize AV codecs as patentable (and which is why VLC is distributed from France) and Semtech is based out of Grenoble!
No, for instance Chirp Spread Sprectrum (mentioned by @tonyarkles in another reply), which is what you would patent (and there are patents on it) has nothing to do with software, although it can be implemented in software using SDR.
It's a very specific form of spread spectrum that they've called Chirp Spread Spectrum and as far as I recall it is actually a pretty novel form of modulation.
The fact that spreading factors are orthogonal as well is also pretty impressive. In the ham space other than FT-8 you don't really see a whole lot of interesting modulation techniques like you do with LoRa. The fact that it works over ISM bands is pretty neat and you can do some impressive things with just a couple ~$20 AT command based radios.
> The fact that spreading factors are orthogonal as well is also pretty impressive
This has been quite standard for 20+ years. For instance 3G spreading codewords are also orthogonal. If fact, I think LoRa took a lot from mobile/cellular where all those technics have been used for a long time.
I guess it depends a lot on what you're trying to use it for. Long-range low-power radio is pretty much guaranteed to suck in a congested environment; the noise floor is going to be high unless you're using narrow-beam point-to-point antennas (with interference both from other devices using the same protocol and other devices sharing the unlicensed spectrum). I've played with it in two environments so far and it has worked fabulously well in both of them:
- Rural sensors attached to things like grain bins, where a pair of AA batteries can last multiple seasons sending periodic temperature updates and alerts if the temperature starts climbing at a faster than expected rate
- Mobile rural sensors worked quite well too. These were attached to things like tractors and had GPS receivers attached for real-time position tracking. Power wasn't nearly as much of a concern but rather taking advantage of the long-range capability while staying inside the unlicensed ISM band and respecting FCC/ISED power limits.
- Low-density urban where the neighbourhoods are made up primarily of single-family homes and not multi-storey condos or apartments. It worked well but honestly something like Zigbee would have likely been a more appropriate technology since it would have allowed for even lower power in the end devices.
That being said, LoRa is a really interesting protocol. Very adjustable to tune for a use case, somewhat novel modulation scheme. LoRaWAN on top of it is well designed. I implemented it from scratch once and was generally impressed with the design. Easy enough to implement and does a very good job and minimizing how long the radio (both Tx and Rx) need to be on.