Wien Energie is partnering with Paris-headquartered IoT network provider Actility to deploy a city-wide LoRaWAN in Vienna.
The initiative is in line with Vienna’s digital strategy, which aims to position the city as “the most livable and smartest in the world”, according to a statement, which continues that it leans into its commitment to human digitalisation, ensuring the technology supports its residents rather than displacing them.
Actility will deploy its ThingPark wireless platform, which has been designed for the industrial IoT with security, carrier-grade availability, scalability, multi-radio support and adherence to the latest specifications of the LoRa Alliance and claimed to power over half of national LoRaWAN network deployments worldwide.
“Wien Energie is a utility provider that understands the need for strong, reliable partnerships,” says Paul Prinz-Wallner, Product Owner IoT – Business Development Telecommunications at Wien Energie.
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“With [Actility’s] expertise, we are equipped to implement and manage sustainable IoT use cases that directly benefit our city.”
Wiener Netze, a sister company of Wien Energie, is entrusted with building the outdoor network in Vienna, while Wien Energie focuses on indoor solutions.
The network is currently undergoing a testing process, with the implementation of use cases and projects for smarter resource use and sustainable urban living expected to begin in early 2024.
Wien Energie is Austria’s largest regional energy provider and in addition to electricity, heating and cooling, also provides electromobility and telecommunications services.
LoRaWAN has been an offering of Wien Energie and an example of a reference project is ‘Cool Streets’, which was implemented in 2022 with heat waves and other weather extremes becoming more and more frequent in Vienna.
In the project, so-called fog steles were installed at 24 locations to provide cooling water mist sprays. Special challenges of the project were the recording of local temperatures and the automated control of the fog steles without an external power supply.
Another is the ‘Cape 10’ project at its ‘House of the Future and Social Innovation’, with the greening of its façade.
An intelligent LoRaWAN-based irrigation system was implemented to automatically and optimally irrigate the façade based on soil moisture, temperature and other sensing and communication with valve control boxes. In addition to data transmission, control logics and data visualisation were developed for the customer.
