The City of Wyndham is a suburb (Correction: Wyndham is a municipality in the state of Victoria, not a suburb) located on the western edge of Melbourne (Victoria state, Australia) that has seen a massive growth in population, doubling in the last 10 years and now reaching more than 240,000 inhabitants.

For that reason, Wyndham City Council’s Smart City Office is working with internal departments to identify IoT based solutions that could be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of council-delivered services and improve the quality of life of their growing community.   These type of solutions would also allow council to gather granular data across the city to provide support for better decision making.

Wyndham City is rolling out a number of initial projects including: water tank level monitoring, sewer pump monitoring and pedestrian counting. Further projects being considered include: waste bin monitoring, dog monitoring, shopping trolley tracking, air quality monitoring and noise monitoring.

To undertake these projects, a low power wide area network (LPWAN) that forms the IoT connectivity backbone for an array of such smart cities applications was installed.  The availability of a dedicated IoT network offers reduced connectivity costs for council applications and its constituents. The specific requirements of sensors – extended battery life, wide geographic coverage and relatively minor data transmission requirements make LPWAN much more suitable than 3G/4G/5G and WiFi connectivity.

Wyndham City Council worked closely with Thinxtra – the Australian network operator for Sigfox, a world leader in IoT – to install low power wide area (LPWA) antennas on council structures across the city. Overall, 17 base stations have been installed to provide complete outdoor coverage across the city.

With the IoT network now in place, Wyndham City can start rolling out a range of IoT devices such as air quality sensors, water pressure monitoring, temperature monitoring and asset tracking. The collected data will be used to improve their understanding, management and utilisation of city assets and facilities. Furthermore, the network will be promoted across the city so that schools, institutions and businesses can make use of the network to deploy IoT solutions.

Councillor Aaron An, Wyndham City's Smart City portfolio holder, commented “Given that Wyndham is home to large agricultural and manufacturing industries, we anticipate that these types of businesses will be able to gain significant advantages by deploying IoT solutions which will allow them to improve the efficiency and profitability of their businesses. For example, IoT solutions to measure light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, etc can be deployed and manufacturers will be able to improve visibility across their operations, refine utilization, and reduce waste and costs.”

Wyndham was supported by Thinxtra to fast track such solutions towards more efficiencies via the Smart Council Program.

Regis Berdaa, added: “Local businesses and organisations could also leverage this IoT network to create new business opportunities and operational efficiencies, that could be replicated on a national or even global scale.”

As a Council, you can take part in this program by simply contacting Thinxtra at smartcouncil@thinxtra.com to request a meeting with our smart-council team to tailor our approach to your IoT strategy.

On a last note, Thinxtra was the 2018 winner of The Communications Alliance Acomms Award as Best Marketing Initiative for this smart council program.

Orignally published by Renald Gallis.