Shoalhaven Water are the council-owned water authority for the Shoalhaven City Council area situated around the Shoalhaven River valley and coastal region encompassing Kangaroo Valley, Nowra, Jervis Bay and as far south as Ulladulla, on the south coast of NSW, Australia. Shoalhaven Water were early adopters of LoRaWAN technology. They used the global free LoRaWAN network, The Things Network (TTN). TTN can be used with unlimited numbers of devices, at no additional cost. This model was embraced by Shoalhaven Water control engineers as they saw the potential for low-cost data acquisition at scale.
Shoalhaven Water have been relying on TTN for LoRaWAN services but realised that it had one “achilles heel”. TTN is free, and as a result, it has no service level agreements. If there are outages you can’t complain because you are not paying for any level of service. That’s where Meshed came into the equation. The water authority realised that they needed to have more certainty, flexibility, resilience and network availability, and back-to-back service level agreements, as they began to scale up from initial proof-of-concept projects.
Meshed provided Shoalhaven Water with an enterprise-grade version of TTN, The Things Industries (TTI) Private Network. This is hosted in Australia by Meshed on AWS Enterprise infrastructure with no disruption to the existing TTN services and sensors.
What this now means is that Shoalhaven Water can use their existing LoRaWAN telecommunications infrastructure for both their own private sensors (with service level assurance) as well as providing free-public LoRaWAN for the Council, local businesses and the whole community – not to mention themselves, with no disruption or visits to gateways or physical infrastructure. The IoT data can end up in the same databases, dashboards and telemetry systems regardless of whether the sensor is on the public or the private network.
