Another long-range communications technology for IoT and edge analytics is LoRa and its WAN version, LoRaWAN. LoRa simply stands for Long Range and LoRaWAN for Long-Range Wide Area Network. LoRa operates in the UHF frequency bands with frequencies of 433 MHz (Asia), 868 MHz (Europe), and 915 MHz (North America). Unlike Sigfox, anyone can make their own LoRaWAN network by buying appropriate hardware. The following diagram is an example of using a LoRa Gateway to connect devices with LoRa transceivers to the internet using either Wi-Fi, cellular data (3G or 4G), or Ethernet:

The following photograph shows an actual LoRa Gateway device, the Dragino LG-01:

LoRa networks using such a system as the preceding may see ranges of up to 10 km, all the while requiring a low amount of power. We will be using LoRa in a project in Chapter 6, Using MicroPython for Edge Analytics.