This week our group focused on the basics of communication networks. We felt like other groups can brainstorm and diagnose problems more quickly, like the state of education or transportation in India. But telecom, at times, even the engineers can feel overwhelmed. We see part of problem is that no one has a rock solid understanding of communication networks such as: what are the variety of protocols available and their tradeoffs? the different types of topologies and their tradeoffs? what are the choices in bandwidth and those tradeoffs?

We’ve been thinking about a really good question that we received in QA from the panel: why SigFox over IBM LoRa? Our answer was we’re getting support for SigFox. We want to have a better answer to questions like those, and so we’ve been reading up on more basics. On that note, I’ve been finding some great online resources. Of the presentations and articles I’ve read, I like this presentation the most on LPWAN:

http://www.slideshare.net/PeterREgli/lpwan

Overall, we think we are making good progress considering that we switched our idea last week, and we’ve identified holes in our understanding of the key issues and are working to close the gap.

 

The Telecommunications Group

Nathaniel Parke, Woody Chung, Samuel Penny, Rachel Gross, Thomas Koch