One of the challenges with installing LoRaWAN gateways on corporate or even private networks is having to deal with port forwarding and potentially dynamic dns issues. For example, I am part of the Boston IoT group and I am in the process of prototyping a mLinux multitech Ethernet gateway at the company I work for. The first step is to get IT involved in order to put the gateway on a secure part of the network with ports 1700 forwarded. The multitech I have is Ethernet only and is likely to be the lowest cost solution for a free and open network.
While this is doable in my case it is a quite a hurdle in general. It makes it more difficult to find willing participants to install gateways when IT has to get involved.
Googling around I discovered that Websockets might be an attractive alternative if done over port 80 or 443 as these ports are typically open in most networks. There are even examples of Websockets to UDP bridges: https://gist.github.com/marmorkuchen-net/48544bd61183da666e6d
If the Croft server supported Websockets as an alternative to UDP and if the gateway packet forwarder was forked to add Websockets as an alternative transport this might provide us with a way to make installation behind firewalls less difficult.
Any thoughts on this?