Quite the contrary. Informal interviews provide no real information and cause interviewers to fall-back to stereotyping and unconscious bias. Formal interviews, done right, provide real data.

True in Europe (CE) but it works differently in the US (FCC).

The FCC limits time spent transmitting in a single channel ("time on air"), but there's no duty cycle limit if you follow the channel hopping rules.

Sounds like an interesting challenge. Hit us up if you'd like to try out Beep's kit -- daniel at beepnetworks dot com.

Good point. I meant ad hoc tower deployment, not ad hoc mesh networks. Our topology is (mostly) star. Will update to clarify.

Some folks have asked -- is this really a cellular network?

In the strictest sense, Yes -- it's a coordinated group of basestations which together form a large area network.

The network stacks are not (yet) a part of the 3GPP standard. Handoffs are different. Cells can overlap and don't need to be planned in the same way as traditional cellular networks.

But the reason for these differences is to make the network better for IoT -- battery life, number of devices supported, etc.

Also, if LoRaWAN and others aren't cellular, then neither are the emerging LTE IoT standards. They follow similar strategies.

Or, that's my view anyway. Thoughts?

Appears that TP-Link's heart is not in this -- they're doing the minimum to comply with FCC rules.

Will be interesting to watch the arms race between OpenWRT and the reluctant ODMs.

> Appears that TP-Link's heart is not in this -- they're doing the minimum to comply with FCC rules.

The FCC has commented that the minimum is significantly less than what TP-Link actually implemented. See https://ifixit.org/blog/7571/fcc-routers/ (and the linked FCC amendment) for more information.

TP-Link appears to be doing the minimum as in "minimum effort", as opposed to "minimum restriction to firmware modifications".

The article you linked shows that people saw it coming:

> Open source projects might not be fully out of the woods yet, though. A few commenters on the FCC’s post have pointed out that some manufacturers might choose to lock down the whole router—as opposed to just the radio—as a cost-saving measure, even if that’s not what the FCC intended.

At the very least they could start selling some DD-WRT routers to appease the critics and make them forget all of their other products are closed, but they aren't even willing to do that.

This is why I always buy Buffalo routers. They are marginally more expensive, but in the same way I will intentionally buy laptops that ship with Linux as a price premium, I'll also buy routers that ship open source firmware by default because my money sends a message.

It does not matter that I replaced Ubuntu on my Galago with Arch or the DDWRT on my wzr-n600 with OpenWRT, becauase I'm on the books at these companies buying hardware running open source software.

Maybe if you keep trying you'll get it right. :)

that's 1600 devices simultaneously communicating. a sensor might only spend a fraction of a percent of its time transmitting data, so the number of devices supported is orders of magnitude higher.