I have a Nova cellular modem with SARA-R410M-02B-01 on it, I have successfully been able to connect to the hologram LTE network and send a message to my hologram dashboard. This is nice, however to really turn heads I would like to send data like pressure, light level, and gnss location from my Mangoh red board (also LTE connected to the sierra wireless lte network) to the hologram lte device (which is connected to the hologram lte network). The sensors I mentioned are factory installed on the mangoh red and their data is being sent to the airvantage cloud server (another dashboard similar to holograms dashboard). How can I get two lte devices communicating with eachother? I was thinking this should be done by setting one device as an access point and the other devices as a client, and communicating via their IP addresses, but really not sure.
As a safety precaution we don’t allow device to device communication on our network. If you wanted to send messages to the nova you could send it via our cloud messaging service which is sorta discussed here: https://www.hologram.io/guides/sending-messages-to-a-device and API documentation lives here: Hologram · Apiary
So if I wanted to build my own LTE network which includes a base station of a radio transceiver and high powered antennas (i.e. a cellular tower) to communicate to 40 remote hologram LTE modems, each of which will communicate various data regarding their position, battery life, etc. this would not be possible? I plan on using my own custom network and tower through the mobile carrier verizon on band 3 frequency here in the US.
My vision was to use nova as a gateway to LTE to send and receive data (the middle man), raspberry pi is handling all the data and just pushing it to the LTE channel via nova. It seems it should be as simple as linking the nova to my custom network (not holograms lte network) via its IP address, which the gateway should assign. As long as the base station has the IP address of the nova it can communicate with the Nova, i assume - in this case I do not know which part of this will be the gateway. Is this possible?
Uh… you’re talking about something incredibly complex, this isn’t a minor undertaking and honestly is probably outside the scope of help anyone on this forum can provide. Do you own spectrum or have contacted the FCC about broadcasting on that frequency band? Do you have all the equipment needed to run a network? I honestly think whether the nova can do what your asking is the least of your technical issues. My short answer is yes, if you had your own network and had the IP addresses of the devices you could send data to the nova. The nova is just a USB breakout of the UBlox cellular modem and we don’t do anything to limit it.
If you’re going to operate your own LTE network you will still need to ensure whoever is hosting your LTE packet core network (West Central Wireless for example) allows MO-MT connections. For those not wanting to build their infrastructure, some carriers and MVNOs allow what you are asking for through a private APN where your devices have their own virtual address space. Verizon still offers SIMs with public IPs and you can use that for direct device to device connections, but then anyone else on the Internet can also connect to your devices.
But as Dom said, if you have the technical skills to deploy your own RAN, this should be the least of your problems to handle.