My use case for lora or loraWAN has always been just that:signaling. Probably not going to use it like WiFi. But there are some fun projects out there. I agree its lame that semtech owns it and it's not open source. I assume you are aware, but if not, check out the gnu radio companion module for lora, I believe some enterprising rf lovers reverse engineered some of the modulation scheme for tx/rx with an SDR a few years ago.