Quite the contrary. Informal interviews provide no real information and cause interviewers to fall-back to stereotyping and unconscious bias. Formal interviews, done right, provide real data.
Some folks have asked -- is this really a cellular network?
In the strictest sense, Yes -- it's a coordinated group of basestations which together form a large area network.
The network stacks are not (yet) a part of the 3GPP standard. Handoffs are different. Cells can overlap and don't need to be planned in the same way as traditional cellular networks.
But the reason for these differences is to make the network better for IoT -- battery life, number of devices supported, etc.
Also, if LoRaWAN and others aren't cellular, then neither are the emerging LTE IoT standards. They follow similar strategies.
that's 1600 devices simultaneously communicating. a sensor might only spend a fraction of a percent of its time transmitting data, so the number of devices supported is orders of magnitude higher.
Yes, on the Continent, at least! I'm not sure about the UK.
Both LoRa and Sigfox came out of French companies, and several wireless carriers have announced plans to build networks. Also check out The Things Network guys in Amsterdam who are trying to crowdsource a network, very cool stuff.
Maybe -- throughput depends on which radio tech we're talking about, and the networks need to get built with density appropriate for the task.
LoRa radios that are close to a gateway can dynamically shift to a 300 Kbps mode, or down to a long-range mode that's ~10Kbps (but yes could also be degraded further by error rate if at edge-of-range).
LoRa basestation gateways are available off-the-shelf for from Kerlink, Multitech, and Link Labs. The gateways are actually quite simple, they just forward packets to the cloud network server, and back to the clients.
We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)
For LoRa, check out Multitech, LinkLabs, and Libelium. Semtech has a development board, too, though it would need to be paired with a microcontroller. Warning that most of this stuff is not for the faint of heart -- you need to be ready to dive into datasheets, bring up radio drivers, etc.
Ingenu has radio modules and dev boards, but I don't think they're set up to sell single-unit quantity.
If you're in San Francisco, we're making a going to be distributing dev boards that will work out of the box and come with a bunch of sensors. Just sign up on our website: www.beepnetworks.com