Where data is processed is not an abstract question for Australian government and infrastructure buyers. It shapes latency, it shapes resilience, and it shapes what a procurement team is able to approve.
In the early years of the global Things Network, none of the network server infrastructure was in this part of the world. Every Australian device was, in effect, a long way from its own network.
What changed in 2017
Meshed established local hosting infrastructure for The Things Network in Australia in September 2017.
Caruana-McManus described it at the time as providing a federated hosting architecture in country. Australian users no longer had to route traffic via the Netherlands, and the server was accessible to Things Network users in New Zealand as well.
Why routing distance mattered
Three things improve when the network server sits in the same region as the devices.
Latency falls, which matters for anything where a sensor reading triggers a response rather than simply being logged. Resilience improves, because the path between device and server is shorter and crosses fewer administrative boundaries. And the data sovereignty conversation becomes much simpler, which for government and critical infrastructure buyers is often the difference between a project proceeding and stalling.
What it was serving by then
By September 2017 Meshed had installed and was operating networks in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Wollongong and Cairns, having run a community network since early 2016 that let anyone within range of a gateway connect sensors for free. It had also delivered a private network for the City of the Gold Coast.
The onshore hosting decision served all of that at once, which is why it was worth doing.
More on government IoT · managed network.
This work was reported by IoT Hub, Australia's Internet of Things trade publication.
“Free-access LoRaWAN network gets Sydney hub”, IoT Hub, 22 September 2017.
