What exactly are LoRaWAN service providers needed for?

[kfricke]

As a backer of the upcoming LoPy board from the WiPy makers (Pycom) i am very interested in this new technology. Personally i do not have any background regarding LoRaWAN and long-range wireless technologies.

My use-case will be one LoPy on my bike and the second as my private LoRaWAN gateway at home.

There are several service providers for LoRaWAN one can register to. So they seem to provide "publicly subscribable" networks, which one can use to access the internet from their device? So in other words they would provide gateways one can connect to in case you do not have your own LoRa WAN infrastructure available!?
What other services do/will they provide?

[deshipu]

As far as I can tell, they provide the LoRaWAN stations with large coverage. I know that Swisscom is doing that here in Zürich, and that it plans to cover pretty much the whole city.

[bmarkus]

At the beginning of the Kickstarter project there was an announcement of deal with few service providers that they will offer service free for one end device. But it depends on your location, whether your area is connected or not.

You may check https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/ also.

One more source of information is http://openlora.com/forum/

[pythoncoder]

The things network seems to imply amateurs setting up their own LoRa internet gateways with free access. Given the range of LoRa devices and the relatively low cost of building a gateway with something like a Raspberry Pi, I could envisage fairly widespread coverage in a few years, at least in urban areas. It seems it's already happened in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

I guess the big companies offer servers with the usual benefits for commercial deployments but I can envisage most amateurs running their own MQTT broker (or whatever) on a Pi or equivalent. The bandwidth is very low.