Meshed was engaged by the City of Greater Geelong to establish LoRaWAN coverage across large tracts of the municipality, with the objective of enabling technologies that support the city's vision for a Clever and Creative Future.
A Clever and Creative Future
The vision came first and the network followed, which is the right order and a rarer one than it should be. Geelong had already decided what it wanted the city to become. The question put to us was what infrastructure would let the widest range of people contribute to that.
As Matthew Szymczak, Smart City Lead at the City of Greater Geelong, described the programme, it would invest in smart city technology to deliver LED lighting, environmental sensing, digital signage and smart parking, benefiting the community by encouraging local industry growth in digital services, with the associated data analytics enabling evidence-based decision making and planning.
What One Network Can Carry
A single LoRaWAN network supports a wide spread of applications without further infrastructure spend. In Geelong's case the shortlist covered street lighting control, environmental sensing, digital signage, pedestrian and device counting, smart parking, and smart waste bins.
The economics of that list are the point. Each of those, procured separately with its own connectivity, is a project. Sharing one network turns them into a sequence of sensor deployments against infrastructure that is already paid for.
The Decision That Made It Unusual
One of the most attractive features of the Meshed model for Geelong was that all citizens and businesses can use the coverage at no cost. The network runs on The Things Network global IoT cloud, so anyone can connect a device and get data back from it.
That opens innovation to everyone in the area at the lowest possible cost, which is what lets school students, entrepreneurs, technologists and technology start-ups actually build something. A council network locked to council devices produces council outcomes. An open one produces outcomes nobody at the council had thought of.
That is Matthew Szymczak again, and the observation reaches past Geelong's own boundary. Radio coverage does not stop at a municipal line, so a network built this way is a regional asset whether or not it was funded as one. The same logic drove the Smart Shires network across regional New South Wales.
The Data Exchange
Meshed has worked with Greater Geelong on the City of Greater Geelong Data Exchange, counting devices in key areas of the municipality. Those counts became more than an operational metric during the pandemic, when they fed into a national picture of how movement in Australian cities was changing week by week.
You can read what that data showed in our COVID-19 pedestrian index research.
A network the whole city can reach is worth more than a network the council alone can use.
