Context
One of Australia's premier coastal tourism regions attracts millions of local and international visitors with its beaches, outdoor lifestyle and year-round calendar of major sporting, cultural and community events.
New Year's Eve is one of the busiest nights of the year, with large crowds gathering across beaches, foreshore parks and shared pathways for family-friendly fireworks displays. For New Year's Eve 2026, fireworks were launched from onshore and offshore locations across three major beachfront tourism hotspots.
The Challenge
Managing large-scale events across open, unfenced coastal environments requires the Local Government Authority to understand crowd numbers and movement in real time while supporting public safety, emergency response, traffic management, cleaning and amenity servicing.
Traditional approaches, including manual counts, CCTV and post-event estimates, can be slow, costly, difficult to scale and potentially raise privacy concerns. Council needed a solution that could operate without mains power or fixed infrastructure while providing timely insights without capturing personal data.
The nCounter Solution
Leveraging its existing public-access LoRaWAN network, managed by Meshed, Council deployed seven nCounter people-counting devices across key beachfront viewing areas.
Using passive Wi-Fi probe detection, nCounter measures footfall and dwell times within defined zones without collecting personal or identifiable information. Aggregated data is transmitted over LoRaWAN and visualised through the nCounter Platform and Council's Power BI environment, giving teams access to near-real-time insights.
Results
During the New Year's Eve event, nCounter recorded more than 70,000 visitors, with an average dwell time of 16.2 minutes.
The data enabled Council to monitor crowd volumes, validate safety strategies, support post-event servicing and quantify attendance with greater confidence.
Beyond New Year's Eve
Council has since deployed more than 30 nCounter devices across tourism hotspots and mobile sensing trailers. Data is supporting planning for shopping precincts, parking and mobility, active transport infrastructure, and events including triathlons, marathons and surf carnivals.
nCounter provides Council with a scalable, low-power and privacy-by-design approach to understanding how public spaces are used, supporting safer events and more evidence-based investment decisions. The same fleet underpins a digital kiosk deployment in the region's strip shopping precincts.
A crowd nobody can count is a safety plan built on a guess.
