Shoalhaven Water's control engineers saw the potential of LoRaWAN early. The Things Network gave them low-cost data acquisition at scale, with unlimited devices and no transmission fees. It carried them from first experiments to real operational sensing. Then scale exposed the one thing a free network cannot give a utility.
Early Adopters With One Weakness
The Things Network is free, and that free model has a consequence. There are no service level agreements. If there is an outage, nobody owes you a fix, because nobody is being paid for a level of service. For proof-of-concept projects that trade-off is fine. For a water authority moving toward operational dependence on its sensing, it is not.
As Shoalhaven Water scaled up, they needed certainty, flexibility, resilience and network availability, with back-to-back service level agreements behind them.
A Private Network Without a Rebuild
Meshed provided Shoalhaven Water with an enterprise-grade version of the same technology, The Things Industries Private Network, hosted in Australia by Meshed on AWS enterprise infrastructure. It acts as a bolt-on to existing Things Network infrastructure, which is the detail that matters most.
Meshed did the preparatory work in the background until the private network was ready for deployment. Existing gateways and sensors kept operating throughout. For a utility whose infrastructure is spread across a river valley and a long coastline, an upgrade that requires no field visits is an upgrade that actually happens.
Public and Private on the Same Infrastructure
The result is one physical network running two services. Shoalhaven Water's own sensors run on the private network with service level assurance. The same infrastructure provides free public LoRaWAN for the council, local businesses and the community. And the data lands in the same databases, dashboards and existing SCADA and telemetry systems regardless of which side a sensor sits on.
That dual model turns a utility's operational network into regional digital infrastructure, the same pattern Meshed has delivered for councils in Adelaide and Victoria.
What Enterprise Grade Buys
Beyond the service levels, the private network gives Shoalhaven Water more flexibility in how often sensors transmit, how downlinks are used, and how the network itself is designed. Those are the levers a control engineer actually wants once sensing becomes part of operations rather than an experiment.
The region's geography also produced one for the record books. In field testing under exceptional line-of-sight conditions, a confirmed link reached 70 kilometres. That is not a typical figure and should never be planned on, but it says something about what the technology can do across a coastal valley when the sight lines line up.
Start free, prove the value, then add service levels without touching a sensor. That is how a utility adopts new infrastructure without betting the operation on it.
