Known LoRaWAN Region Plan Issues

[abhay]

The core developers are working with members of the community to modify a few region parameters that specify the LoRaWAN region that Hotspots operate in. As many of you know, after PoCv11 was activated, regions are no longer statically defined in a configuration file on the Hotspot and does not depend on the API (which can be unreliable, is not decentralized, and dependent on a geo-coder defined by Google). Moving this configuration on chain promotes network resilience and enables community driven governance of LoRaWAN configurations.

The community has identified a few issues that affects some Hotspots in the Philippines, Curacao, Cayman Islands, Aruba, Kosovo, Malta, Armenia, and Hong Kong, We've estimated that it affects about 1200 Hotspots (of the 414K+ Hotspots on chain).

Normally we'd be comfortable with issuing a chain variable to update these regions even on a weekend, but we will not be able to do so until we scope a few performance related concerns that may cause long reward blocks and disrupt the network rather than the < 0.5% Hotspots currently affected.

Given this context, the core developers will scope the work that needs to be done over the next couple of weeks. Taking into account the upcoming Holidays, we don't expect this to be updated before early January.

Thanks for understanding. Happy to answer any questions on this thread.

[rvjaywaks]

It’s sad to hear that you guys will take a long break, while we here in the Philippines will earn nothing for 3 or more weeks.

[resyncX]

Countries on AS923 are seeing significant drop in beacons witnessed by other and vice-versa due to limited coverage area after max EIRP limit of 27dbm (500mW) reduced to 16dm (40mW) as part of PoCv11.

I understand that you mentioned the possibility of including this (https://github.com/helium/miner/issues/1105) in HIP45.

However, we have tried to post in various chats on helium discord i.e. poc-discussion, dewi, hip-45 but there were hardly any confirmation/response to it hence we are not sure how we can get the devs/dewi committee to consider implementing the LoraWAN subregion/country specific max EIRP limit as part of HIP45 or in future enhancements.

We also understand that now that the regional RF's compliant in the EU/AS/US region, the primary focus would probably be on stability and the next phase for lighthotspots.

We really hope that you can advise if there will be plans for subregion/country specific max EIRP limits implementation. This helps to re-assure the community in AS923 region that their concern has been heard and will be taken care of somewhat in the near future.

[bibi4bb]

Thank you very much for showing how much it means to you that people will get fucked up for ANOTHER 3 weeks. That's after already being offline half of October and mining shit all for the past 5 days . Another 2-3 weeks is nothing compared to what's to come.Next time it will be 3%,5% etc

Signed , One of the 0.5% morons who believed in your project

[J0SHINAT0R]

Just because its only 0.5% does not mean that we are more or less important than the rest of the hotspots out there... This happened because you guys launched an update that was obviously not 100% ready to launch. I understand that holidays are coming up, but the least you could do is compensate us for all the rewards we are currently losing due to a mistake that you guys made. by this rate, we will have gone an entire month with no rewards by the time its fixed. Perhaps you could see what rewards we all did the previous month and just add them to our Wallets. Or give us all a reward scale of 2.0 for 30 days after the fix.

Its only fair.

Anyway enjoy your holidays and i hope that this gets fixed at your earliest convenience.

[waveform06]

It’s sad to hear that you guys will take a long break, while we here in the Philippines will earn nothing for 3 or more weeks.

They didn't say they are taking a long break. They said the work to do correctly and not cause problems will take two weeks but due to the holiday will take an additional week.

[Sacconator]

It's so Sad that you are comparing us 1200 networkers With 414k like we are nobody we invested like others! So why don't you at least give us a little compensation for all this hessle that you cost us.

Hope that it will be aranged very soon as i believed in your project like the other 1200 hotspots!

[siberiatrix]

before you guys start crying, remember that in Russia we have been sitting disconnected from the service since September, so welcome to the club

[J0SHINAT0R]

Since September? was it even reported? some kind of compensation is surely due especially for you guys!

Like lets say a company invests and switches their products such as E-Bikes to rely and use the helium network as their IoT... and suddenly a whole country is down... this is bigger then just 0.5%

This is a lack of reliability which will make potential investors more hesitant... like isnt that the end game after all?

Every % counts and the constant downtime makes the network unreliable and nobody would want to switch to it for their day to day IoT

[SeaworldSolo]

Seriously disappointed in the lack of priority this is getting.

So we're just supposed to sit back and wait a few weeks while more hotspots come online to diminish our earnings? My poor hosts in the Philippines just got hit by a typhoon, now they've also got very little income coming in for Christmas.

[abhay]

However, we have tried to post in various chats on helium discord i.e. poc-discussion, dewi, hip-45 but there were hardly any confirmation/response to it hence we are not sure how we can get the devs/dewi committee to consider implementing the LoraWAN subregion/country specific max EIRP limit as part of HIP45 or in future enhancements.

This is a bit off topic from this thread and I think you've gotten this response in each of the places you've mentioned but may have missed them. I'll repeat here and say a bit more than what's been said elsewhere.

HIP-45 allows for a solution for the problem of multiple supported channel plans / frequencies within a country which I don't think is the thing you're thinking about. The particular issue you're highlighting is that some countries (within a LoRaWAN region) may allow transmitters to transmit at an even higher power than other countries in the same region .

I believe the way forward here is implement LoRaWAN subregions. The steps to get there are as follows (like all major changes to the blockchain):

1. There could be a HIP around this yet and could be written.
2. The software to be written to the core blockchain. The team is supportive of this and we'd help if a community member wanted to get started. We'll probably prioritize this in Q1 otherwise.
3. Software update deployed to all Hotspots, Validators, etc to support the new rules. This is consensus affecting so it needs to be a full deployment.
4. The LoRaWAN committee of the DeWI needs to propose and manage the subregion settings. They also could propose initial chain variables.
5. These variables should be maintained by the LoRaWAN committee on an ongoing basis.

One thing I like about HIP-45 is that if the community disagrees with the LoRaWAN committee, there's a proposal to allow the community to vote on changes as well.

[tzacha]

btw in AS923_4 (israel) its the same .... untill now we recived for 150km now is only less then 7km.

i think that you have more then 0.5% miners in all AS923 reagion

[bibi4bb]

How nice you can answer something but not the main issue. It's so nice you guys can ignore 6 countries of the list cause it's just 1200 miners.As long as the big spoofing companies with 40+ miners are still working there's no issue

[abhay]

It’s sad to hear that you guys will take a long break, while we here in the Philippines will earn nothing for 3 or more weeks.

They didn't say they are taking a long break. They said the work to do correctly and not cause problems will take two weeks but due to the holiday will take an additional week.

This is correct. There's no "long break" or "lack of prioritization" as is being insinuated on this thread. The changes needed to help the Hotspots affected here are risky for the network as a whole. We will figure it out but we don't want to make a hasty change that could cause a long rewards block or risk other issues that we've all experienced in the past few weeks.

As always, this open source project is happy to take contributions from the community.

[Adiargov]

Your approach to the scope of the issue is wrong! Helium is about coverage not about quantity of miners in the same hex. The majority of 400k miners are covering the same areas in the US, the portion of the as923 in coverage of the "world" is much bigger % in coverage for the Helium network. How can calculate the size of as923 vs us915 in % coverage of the world 🌎?

[bibi4bb]

If it would be the USA having this issue be sure the network would be down for all of us , no matter the risk they would make that hasty change! You want coverage all around the world? Treat everybody the same no matter 0.5% , 5% or 50%

[tzacha]

i agree As923 is the next to be developed ... but people see all the problems and keep away . from the Helium due to that. the potential for covarage is great . but it seems that if you wont solve those issues soon you will lose the momentum....

[waveform06]

Well done to you all! Lets all just leave the miners to suffer while we do nothing about it. Lets just ignore the 1.2k because we can, we're too big now, so we dont have to care about them. Thank you for showing your appreciation for it. I hope you get the reward you deserve for treating the minor part of the community this way.

They are not doing nothing about it..... can you read?. "The changes needed to help the Hotspots affected here are risky for the network as a whole. We will figure it out but we don't want to make a hasty change that could cause a long rewards block or risk other issues that we've all experienced in the past few weeks." and "will not be able to do so until we scope a few performance related concerns that may cause long reward blocks and disrupt the network rather than the < 0.5% Hotspots currently affected."

The risk is to the whole network if they proceed quickly and that includes your hotspots. There have been so many complaints in the past that they "did not do proper testing", when things go wrong so this time they see a problem in implementing a fix quickly so are doing it in a way for least disruption.

[resyncX]

However, we have tried to post in various chats on helium discord i.e. poc-discussion, dewi, hip-45 but there were hardly any confirmation/response to it hence we are not sure how we can get the devs/dewi committee to consider implementing the LoraWAN subregion/country specific max EIRP limit as part of HIP45 or in future enhancements.

This is a bit off topic from this thread and I think you've gotten this response in each of the places you've mentioned but may have missed them. I'll repeat here and say a bit more than what's been said elsewhere.

HIP-45 allows for a solution for the problem of multiple supported channel plans / frequencies within a country which I don't think is the thing you're thinking about. The particular issue you're highlighting is that some countries (within a LoRaWAN region) may allow transmitters to transmit at an even higher power than other countries in the same region .

I believe the way forward here is implement LoRaWAN subregions. The steps to get there are as follows (like all major changes to the blockchain):

1. There could be a HIP around this yet and could be written.

2. The software to be written to the core blockchain. The team is supportive of this and we'd help if a community member wanted to get started. We'll probably prioritize this in Q1 otherwise.

3. Software update deployed to all Hotspots, Validators, etc to support the new rules. This is consensus affecting so it needs to be a full deployment.

4. The LoRaWAN committee of the DeWI needs to propose and manage the subregion settings. They also could propose initial chain variables.

5. These variables should be maintained by the LoRaWAN committee on an ongoing basis.

One thing I like about HIP-45 is that if the community disagrees with the LoRaWAN committee, there's a proposal to allow the community to vote on changes as well.

Thank you for the detailed explanation @abhay, appreciate that.

[Findagdar]

The core developers are working with members of the community to modify a few region parameters that specify the LoRaWAN region that Hotspots operate in. As many of you know, after PoCv11 was activated, regions are no longer statically defined in a configuration file on the Hotspot and does not depend on the API (which can be unreliable, is not decentralized, and dependent on a geo-coder defined by Google). Moving this configuration on chain promotes network resilience and enables community driven governance of LoRaWAN configurations.

The community has identified a few issues that affects some Hotspots in the Philippines, Curacao, Cayman Islands, Aruba, Kosovo, Malta, Armenia, and Hong Kong, We've estimated that it affects about 1200 Hotspots (of the 414K+ Hotspots on chain).

Normally we'd be comfortable with issuing a chain variable to update these regions even on a weekend, but we will not be able to do so until we scope a few performance related concerns that may cause long reward blocks and disrupt the network rather than the < 0.5% Hotspots currently affected.

Given this context, the core developers will scope the work that needs to be done over the next couple of weeks. Taking into account the upcoming Holidays, we don't expect this to be updated before early January.

Thanks for understanding. Happy to answer any questions on this thread.

Wouldn't the matter be somewhat mitigated if they just decided to provide those 1.2k miners the average miner amount while they aren't able to mine, not due to their fault? It wouldn't cost them a thing basically and everyone would be happy.

[KryptoMyner]

This is bullshit, plain and simple. You fucked whole countries with a buggy implementation. While the solution is known and very straightforward to implement, you're willing to continue fucking these hotspot owners until you get around to rolling out the update because of unrelated systemic issues you want to address first. Is this what this network has become, where individual hotspot owners don't matter unless they are a large enough percentage? Fix your mistakes and do it now. Assigning the proper frequencies to the regions affected are not going to negatively affect the entire network. This system isn't that fragile, unless you fuck something else up.

[funkymonkey5150]

For reals it really is about Make a lot of people have sent

On Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 12:21 AM KryptoMyner @.***> wrote:

This is bullshit, plain and simple. You fucked whole countries with a buggy implementation. While the solution is known and very straightforward to implement, you're willing to continue fucking these hotspot owners until you get around to rolling out the update because of issues you want to address well beyond providing a remedy, while continuing to censor and ignore the spoofing problem. Is this what this network has become? Fix your mistakes and do it now. Assigning the proper frequencies to the regions affected are not going to negatively affect the entire network. This system isn't that fragile, unless you fuck something else up.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/helium/miner/issues/1305#issuecomment-1000126287, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA7ST7L5XLOZZYH36HJE5TLUSLLZVANCNFSM5KLH4DDQ . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: @.***>

[KryptoMyner]

I hope the core developers are having a wonderful vacation while we earn nothing. They definitely deserve it.

[waveform06]

DISGUSTING, the devs threating us as expandable numbers, 0 trust, I made more than 10 people buying hnt or hnt miners, all I can say to them now, just dump this shit every single fucking earning. Waiting next year? who da fuck u think u are to lack respect to this extreme to people who trusted you and helped you achieve what you are now. NO MORE!! this is unacceptable, highly manipulated and centralized blockchain ever.

SCAM.

When a company has 400K devices with some massive contracted users on the network and they think an update could cause crashing problems on the network worldwide over xmas/ny period with minimal around staff to support, of course they will wait till the new year and it to be fully tested before implementing the change. No sensible company implements big changes over xmas. You've only been involved in this project for a couple of months. Big upsets like this have happened in the past. They affect all or some people, get fixed and we move on. Calling something a scam because a company shows commercial business sense ensuring 99.75% of the network is working shows you don't know really what the company does or how confidence in the price of HNT will be maintained.

[KryptoMyner]

It's had nothing to do with commercial business sense. They screwed it up on the 14th, early enough to fix it before the holidays. If they had business sense they wouldn't have rolled out such a major update if they didn't have time to test it properly right before they took off for vacation without allowing themselves enough time to fix it. And we're not talking major fixes here. We're taking about assigning frequencies that should have been assigned to begin with, had they been properly prepared. Assigning these frequencies doesn't affect the stability of the network, and this "good of the many" argument is pure BS. While I don't think it's a scam per se, I think they lack integrity and should be ashamed of themselves for having so little regard for the people they screwed so they could have a nice break. And the previous poster is correct: do not trust them. Their interests do not align with ours, and they'll screw us over when convenient.

[Nuuki87]

DISGUSTING, the devs threating us as expandable numbers, 0 trust, I made more than 10 people buying hnt or hnt miners, all I can say to them now, just dump this shit every single fucking earning. Waiting next year? who da fuck u think u are to lack respect to this extreme to people who trusted you and helped you achieve what you are now. NO MORE!! this is unacceptable, highly manipulated and centralized blockchain ever. SCAM.

When a company has 400K devices with some massive contracted users on the network and they think an update could cause crashing problems on the network worldwide over xmas/ny period with minimal around staff to support, of course they will wait till the new year and it to be fully tested before implementing the change. No sensible company implements big changes over xmas. You've only been involved in this project for a couple of months. Big upsets like this have happened in the past. They affect all or some people, get fixed and we move on. Calling something a scam because a company shows commercial business sense ensuring 99.75% of the network is working shows you don't know really what the company does or how confidence in the price of HNT will be maintained.

I'm sorry but this is bullshit and you type like that just because you are not in one of the affected countries. I've been in crypto world for like 8 years and THIS? never happened to BTC, ETH etc come on, this is highly manipulative from devs. they promise a decentralized network but it's more controlled than RIPPLE. Genuinely I don't wait, I'll dump as much as possible, there is no trust in this project and if it's not a scam then it's highly incompetent devs.

but it's much easier thinking this is a scam, how weird last months in October with that issue only few hotspot got 500 hnt in a second, how and why them? THIS IS SOOOO DODGY!!!!!

[malcolmspiteri]

Any progress on this? It's been already 3 weeks since my miners flatlined.

It's very confusing that the LoRaWan configuration has been moved on-chain for increased resiliency, but in doing so made configuration changes a high risk activity. Where's the resiliency in that?

[prnhnt]

However, we have tried to post in various chats on helium discord i.e. poc-discussion, dewi, hip-45 but there were hardly any confirmation/response to it hence we are not sure how we can get the devs/dewi committee to consider implementing the LoraWAN subregion/country specific max EIRP limit as part of HIP45 or in future enhancements.

This is a bit off topic from this thread and I think you've gotten this response in each of the places you've mentioned but may have missed them. I'll repeat here and say a bit more than what's been said elsewhere.

HIP-45 allows for a solution for the problem of multiple supported channel plans / frequencies within a country which I don't think is the thing you're thinking about. The particular issue you're highlighting is that some countries (within a LoRaWAN region) may allow transmitters to transmit at an even higher power than other countries in the same region .

I believe the way forward here is implement LoRaWAN subregions. The steps to get there are as follows (like all major changes to the blockchain):

1. There could be a HIP around this yet and could be written.
2. The software to be written to the core blockchain. The team is supportive of this and we'd help if a community member wanted to get started. We'll probably prioritize this in Q1 otherwise.
3. Software update deployed to all Hotspots, Validators, etc to support the new rules. This is consensus affecting so it needs to be a full deployment.
4. The LoRaWAN committee of the DeWI needs to propose and manage the subregion settings. They also could propose initial chain variables.
5. These variables should be maintained by the LoRaWAN committee on an ongoing basis.

One thing I like about HIP-45 is that if the community disagrees with the LoRaWAN committee, there's a proposal to allow the community to vote on changes as well.

What do we need to do to get this fixed?

[waveform06]

What do we need to do to get this fixed?

As it says someone needs to do 1 and 2 to push it quickly or Helium will look at it sometime in Q1. And as you can read above there are those who think that the dev team are not working hard enough with current issues, so adding new problems to resolve and taking their time up just isn't a priority.

[waveform06]

Why not read the code to understand the difficulties - its all public.

[JamesSamsonyan]

Guys we need everyone to write an email to all the important people in Helium. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/helium-systems-inc/people

here is the list. Find them on twitter and message them. We have to somehow grab their attention since they don't give a damn about us and it seems to be very difficult for them to update us on this issue for 15 days already. I don't think they will start fixing it by 15th of January since from 5-8 of January they attend to CES in Las Vegas. Anyway, if Abhay is reading this you and your staff can't continue creating you dream project because of your unprofessionalism!. Enjoy your holidays while we mine 0 hnts!!

[JamesSamsonyan]

Dear helium, instead of deleting users comments maybe you should start updating us regarding the issue? when are you going to fix it?

[KryptoMyner]

Wow, that message must have hit pretty close to home for someone to take time out of their relaxing vacation to read and delete it.

[amirhaleem]

I get that people are frustrated at this poor situation, and we're here to engage in any constructive criticism and discussion as you can see above. trolling/abuse will get you deleted or banned.

timeline hasn't changed from the first post - still early January

[prnhnt]

Can we get an exact date, example no later than 5th of January, I hate those vague statements. You guys really should be more open, I thank you for the general overview, but don't forget this is the People's Network, and we're part of it, it doesn't matter if its 0.5% or 50%. The more transparent the better.

We are here to support the network and we're surviving as we can the few weeks of 0$ rewards. But we are all looking forward to that fix, and at least a definitive date will calm our hearts.

Best.

[amirhaleem]

Can we get an exact date, example no later than 5th of January, I hate those vague statements. You guys really should be more open, I thank you for the general overview, but don't forget this is the People's Network, and we're part of it, it doesn't matter if its 0.5% or 50%. The more transparent the better.

We are here to support the network and we're surviving as we can the few weeks of 0$ rewards. But we are all looking forward to that fix, and at least a definitive date will calm our hearts.

Best.

some of the work in progress lives here: https://github.com/helium/lorawan-h3/pull/9

despite some of the commentary above, it is not straightforward to make these changes, and there's risk of chain halts due to consensus issues with the new chain variables and invalidating all witnesses in the regions if not executed properly. vendors also have to make various config changes to support the new regions, and vendor availability over the holiday period is unknown.

if it were simple we'd of course just make the change and move on without having to upset a portion of the community. appreciate everyones patience on this.

[JamesSamsonyan]

Can we get an exact date, example no later than 5th of January, I hate those vague statements. You guys really should be more open, I thank you for the general overview, but don't forget this is the People's Network, and we're part of it, it doesn't matter if its 0.5% or 50%. The more transparent the better. We are here to support the network and we're surviving as we can the few weeks of 0$ rewards. But we are all looking forward to that fix, and at least a definitive date will calm our hearts. Best.

some of the work in progress lives here: helium/lorawan-h3#9

despite some of the commentary above, it is not straightforward to make these changes, and there's risk of chain halts due to consensus issues with the new chain variables and invalidating all witnesses in the regions if not executed properly. vendors also have to make various config changes to support the new regions, and vendor availability over the holiday period is unknown.

if it were simple we'd of course just make the change and move on without having to upset a portion of the community. appreciate everyones patience on this.

Thank you for your response Amir. We just needed an update from you because haven't heard from you for 2 weeks already. Hope you fix it soon. The other question that bothers us whether will there be a compensation of any sort for those 1.2 k miners? The countries that are on list are the poorest but have the most potential due to transit scale. Thank you

[amirhaleem]

we don’t issue HNT, and there’s no way for the network to really compensate for these types of issues.

next update will hopefully be that the regions are updated and working again. thanks for everyone’s feedback.