Reflecting over the past months, we feel that we need to improve on certain areas to allow ThingsIX to grow faster. Therefore, we will be introducing the following changes:
Lowering the fees for Secure Mappers in the Third-Party-Mapper Program
We are lowering the fees to be paid by the manufacturer to 25 EUR instead of 50 EUR per mapper. For the first 10 manufacturers we are also waiving the project fees. Additionally, we will discuss with manufacturers the possibility to do provisioning at their facilities to reduce overhead.
Introducing Less-Secure Mappers
Soon we will allow regular LoRaWAN mappers supplied by ThingsIX Router operators to be used for mapping the coverage provided by gateways. We acknowledge that these mappings are less reliable. Therefore, they will be handled and displayed separately and only 10% of the total gateway-coverage-rewards will be allocated to coverage mapped by these mappers and there will be no rewards for the mappers themselves. As these mappings can only occur via ThingsIX Routers, Router operators can contact the ThingsIX Foundation on how to set this up. Router operators are of course encouraged to provide or sell these mappers to the community. These rewards for less-secure mappings is a temporary measure to boost the expansion of the network. Once secure mappers are sufficiently available these rewards will be reduced or removed, however the mappers will still be usable.
Liveness Checking of Gateways
One of the common complains of mappers is that gateways they are trying to map are not online or not working. Therefore, we will soon introduce liveness checking into the ThingsIX network and dashboard to give a near-real-time insight into the liveness of gateways. Also, this liveness checking will be used in the reward-calculation to promote highly available gateways and to remove rewards for gateways that are offline for prolonged periods.
Airtime Payment
In the beginning of next year, we will introduce the payments for airtime, where router operators need to pay for the airtime being used by their sensors because of the data-traffic they are sending and receiving over the ThingsIX network.
ThingsIX Foundation Board Elections
The chairman of the ThingsIX Foundation, Jochem, has indicated that he will resign as chairman at the end of this year. Additionally, there is still one of the three seats vacant within the board. Therefore, according to the bylaws of the Foundation, we are inviting ThingsIX Maintenance holders to propose candidates for the two available seats. Only THIXM-holders can propose candidates but the candidate itself doesn’t have to be a THIXM-holder. Candidates must be permissible as board-member according to Dutch law. The THIXM holders will be requested to vote on the proposed candidates. Candidates can be proposed by e-mailing the ThingsIX Foundation ([email protected]) before 11 December 18:00 UTC.
Note: The board of the Foundation is official legal role without compensation. Board members are responsible for the daily operations and well-being of the Foundation and are expected to contribute to the tasks and responsibilities of the Foundation. This is expected to take 4-8 hours a week.