Lake Macquarie City Council approached Meshed in 2017 about providing LoRaWAN coverage across its council area for a set of pilot projects. Those pilots were running alongside IoT Alliance Australia and the UTS Institute of Sustainable Futures.
Starting With Three
We established three Meshed-managed LoRaWAN gateways and provided coverage through The Things Network. Three is a deliberately modest number. It is enough to prove that the radio works over the terrain, that the sensors report reliably and that the data is worth having, without committing the council to infrastructure it has not yet justified.
Having research partners in the room from the start also changed what the pilots could claim. A council reporting its own pilot results is making a case. A council reporting results alongside a university institute is producing evidence.
Smart Beaches and Surf Life Saving
The coverage supported Surf Life Saving services, visitor amenity and environmental sustainability. Working with Northern Beaches Council in Sydney and other stakeholders, the Smart Beaches theme was taken up across both council areas.
Two councils several hours apart, sharing an approach to the same problem, is how a good pattern actually spreads in local government. Neither had to invent it twice. The Randwick Smart Beaches project took the same idea onto the eastern suburbs coastline.
Earning the Expansion
With the pilots behind it, the council bid for Australian Government funding under Round 2 of the Smart Cities and Suburbs Program in 2018 and 2019. The initial project was successful enough that the council went on to deploy a further seventeen gateways, creating LGA-wide LoRaWAN coverage and large areas of open public access.
What Runs on It Now
The council has been rolling out a wide set of applications across that coverage. Micro-climate sensing and air quality monitoring. People counting. Bin sensing and public amenities monitoring. Water quality and flood level.
Every one of those is a separate operational problem owned by a different team, and every one of them now runs over infrastructure that was funded once. That is the compounding return that makes the staged approach worth the patience it demands.
The cheapest network is the one you only have to justify once.
