LoRa modems are all black boxes, available only from a single company. Meanwhile, IEEE 802.11ah, a.k.a. Wi-Fi HaLow, is an open standard that you can download without a fee: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9363693
That is all.
Edit: fixed terminology
I think the chirp spread spectrum part is what’s proprietary. But to the best of my knowledge, the actual radios themselves are not.
the actual radios
Looks like we’re using different terminology. I mean the bits that take care of the RF part. The “chirp spread spectrum”. Perhaps “modem” would be a better word.
But regardless, whatever word you use to refer to it, it’s proprietary. And that’s bad.
Yeah, I agree. That is not great.
Chirp spread spectrum just describes how data is sent, it can’t really be proprietary. It would be like saying waving a flashlight to send morse code was proprietary. The black box part is you say “send this data” then that data comes out of the antenna in the Lora signal. The physical device that connects that data to a signal and visa-versa is what’s proprietary. There could be little tweaks to the transmission that make it work better, like having a slightly non-linear chirp, or some signal processing algorithm that can dig the signal out of some serious noise.
For the most part, a transmission isn’t proprietary, it’s how that transmission is made and how it’s processed that is. In the case of Lora, the radios are cheap and work incredibly well, so there isn’t much of a reason for someone to homebrew their own.
the radios are cheap and work incredibly well
But they’re proprietary. Which is bad.
Edit: and to be clear, it’s not just that the radios are proprietary black boxes, which is bad, it’s also that by using them, you make it necessary for all other parties you communicate with to use matching proprietary black boxes, which is bad squared.
there isn’t much of a reason for someone to homebrew their own
Especially when there’s an existing, open standard for communication using the same principles.