One of Watford BC’s corporate objectives is to ‘deliver a digital Watford to empower our community’. As part of this, we’ve implemented a LoRaWAN network. LoRa is a LPWAN (low power wide area network) used for communicating with Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The beauty of LPWAN is that its power requirement is low so batteries in devices can last for many years without recharge or replacement. The infrastructure required is also relatively small. We have just four gateways covering the whole of Watford. Our rationale for this implementation was that it provides a capability to be more efficient and to deliver against one of the design principles of our corporate transformation programme: that we should not need to check physical things. IoT sensors enable us to know when something needs to be done rather than having to check to see if it does.