City-scale sensing needs a network that reaches everywhere, costs almost nothing per device and runs for years on a battery. Around 2016 the low-power wide-area technologies that make this possible were new, and no Swedish city had one openly available.
Open City Sensor Network established such a network in Lund based on the LoRa standard, open for different actors to connect their own devices to.
An open shared network changes the economics of experimentation: a pilot no longer has to budget for its own connectivity infrastructure. Much of the smart-city work that followed in Lund, including Smarta Offentliga Miljöer and Lund Open Sensoring City, rests on this foundation.
Sensative took part as a supplier of sensors and platform, and the LoRaWAN focus of the company’s later sensor portfolio traces back to this period.
