[chrismorgan]

> 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.

That’s not several orders of magnitude, that’s only 3×. Both figures are kilobits per second.

I would also mention that the Amazon Sidewalk thing is for a hybrid of Bluetooth Low Energy and 900 MHz, and it’s quite plausible that that 80 Kbps could only be achieved over the close-range Bluetooth and not in the long-range 900 MHz frequency. As an outsider to the industry with no specific knowledge of what actually caps LoRaWAN’s speed, I’m going to wildly guess that this 900 MHz band, in whatever guise, may be more likely to yield 10–20 Kbps speeds in good conditions.

[greggyb]

Hey, that's more than an order of magnitude in binary! Great way to make a doubling (or greater) sound bigger than it is.

[chrismorgan]

Still not several. :D

[klyrs]

"Order of magnitude" is one of my linguistic pet peeves. I've seen it used referring to base 2, base 10, base 1000, and base 1024. What does it all mean? In base 2^(1/100), trebling is many, many orders of magnitude increase!

[chrismorgan]

“Order of magnitude” is context-dependent, like a great many things in natural language. In the absence of any contrary context, it’ll mean a decimal order of magnitude in English. It will do you no good to rail against the inclusion of cultural context in resolving the meaning of language (and even its structural parsing!), because it’s so very widespread in English and I presume in every other natural language (though logical languages could potentially theoretically evade it).

I’ve never encountered non-integral bases in real life, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration tells me they are sometimes used. Fun stuff!

[klyrs]

Agreed, railing against language and cultural context is literally futile. Factoradic is the one true base. There, "order of magnitude" would depend not only upon (my very unique) cultural context but also the absolute magnitude involved (at the low end, "double" is an order of magnitude; then "triple", then "quadruple", etc).

[chrismorgan]

I love these sorts of discussions. You learn things you’ve never heard of before. I can easily see how it works and how it’d be useful sometimes, but I’ve never come across it before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_radix is good related reading (including the concept of measuring time in this way; now that is something that we sometimes do in software, more or less).

[jrockway]

The only logical base to use here is 2.71828182.

[1123581321]

I prefer to say “several times larger/greater” and it is even fewer syllables! “Order of magnitude” works better for convincing people to do something your way, though.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Exponential too, which as far as I can tell just means non-linear, at least in media.

[sokoloff]

It doesn't even always mean that. It often just means "a lot bigger"

[windexh8er]

Pretty sure they're getting the 80Kb/s over LoRa. I've used some Pycom devices [0] to try the protocol out and for mesh [1] and it's rather forgiving. Given the number Ring devices people seem to have these days I'm sure Amazon is going to have some relatively large mesh networks at their disposal.

[0] https://pycom.io/products/supported-networks/#lora [1] https://docs.pycom.io/pymesh/

[bri3d]

The fastest LoRaWAN data rate specified in the US is Data Rate 13 LoRa: SF7 / 500 kHz: 21900kbit/s.

Even dropping outside of the highly restrictive LoRaWAN specification and going with the fastest physical parameters available for LoRa on the 900Mhz bands (on-time restrictions aside), BW500 (500kHz bandwidth), Spreading Factor 6, Coding Rate 4:5, you end up with 35700 baud.

You can drop these modems into 2FSK mode and increase speed, but at that point the range isn't particularly appealing.

Regardless, the point stands: not a mesh network WAP internet redux, an IoT tool.

[chrismorgan]

> 21900kbit/s

Correction here, you meant 21900 bits per second (21.9 kibibits per second in SI terms), not kilobits per second.

[bri3d]

My fault, I thought the figures in the article were kilobytes (and even then, I suppose it's just a single order of magnitude in base-10!). I don't think this mistake affects my point.

[chrismorgan]

The universal convention is: b = bits, B = bytes. I see errors only rarely, and they’re almost always when people write Mb or Gb instead of MB or GB (just MB, not MB per second or such). It also fascinates me how we conventionally write Mbps (with a p), but MB/s (with a /).