Kerlink has provided more than 400 Wirnet IoT gateways and its Wanesy management centre for what it says is the largest-known LoRaWan deployment serving a single county, in Finistère Départment on France’s west coast.

Called Finistère Smart Connect, the nearly countywide network will enable smart management and efficient usage of 2000 buildings, 1200 parking places, 400,000 gas-and-water meters, 250 meteorological probes to monitor air quality and 72,000 public lights for smart-lighting applications. Additional public services include smart waste management and water distribution.

As with many LoRaWan deployments around the world, benefits were demonstrated early on, such as a 20 per cent reduction of energy use in some public buildings.

The deployment is the first known use of the LoRaWan protocol by an energy consortium formed to realise the benefits of the IoT to coordinate and customise vital public services according to needs of users over such a large area.

“While the internet of things and smart-city projects are emerging in large metropolitan areas, rural areas and medium-sized towns are still not sufficiently involved in such experiments,” Finistère’s Departmental Union of Energy & Equipment of Finistère (SDEF) explains on its web site. “To address this issue, SDEF and Eiffage Energie Systèmes are going to make a connected territory service available throughout the départment, with the exception of the Brest metropolis. This project will provide local authorities in Finistère with tools to control and manage the implementation of their public policies in the areas of energy and financial efficiency applied to public network services, as well as in the area of citizen relations.”

Kerlink delivered 420 Wirnet iBTS Compact LoRaWan gateways for the project. They are controlled by the company’s Wanesy management centre, a highly modular and complete offering, including an operating support system, base-station controller, radio network controller and LoRaWan server to run, monitor and manage the network.

“The scope of Finistère Smart Connect is unique for its size and its ability to serve many diverse cities and small towns in a single, joint project,” said Stéphane Dejean, Kerlink CMO. “It highlights once again the flexibility for customised designs and deployments, and the long-rage coverage of the LoRaWan protocol, and for the predictably seamless integration of Kerlink industrial-grade gateways and Wanesy management centre in internet of things networks.”

The Finistère Smart Connect project participants from the private sector are: Eiffage Energie Systèmes, a French group specialising in public works; Qwant, a French search engine focused on privacy and security for users; Sensing Vision, a start-up specialising in IoT and network supervision, with Kerlink as subcontractor; and Dolmen, a local customer marketing platform.

More than 140,000 Kerlink installations have been rolled out with over 350 clients in 70 countries. Based in France, with subsidiaries in the USA, Singapore, India and Japan, Kerlink is a co-founder and board member of the LoRa Alliance and the uCIFI Alliance.