National Narrowband Network Co (NNNCo) has been awarded a tender to install and maintain a LoRaWAN network and IoT sensors at the Western Australian Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development research facilities in Katanning and Merredin in the Grainbelt.
The networks will be used for to collect data from a wide range of sensors in a DPIRD project to evaluate, develop and advance ag-tech opportunities in WA.
Applications to be deployed include: sheep tracking, grain level sensing, grain silo temperature and humidity, fuel and water tank levels, gate opening and closing, soil moisture, worker safety trackers, weather stations, water flow and irrigation control.
DPIRAD research officer John Paul Collins said the research facilities would effectively become digital demonstration sites to explore and develop ag-tech opportunities and advances.
“The upgrade will enable the department to ‘ground truth’ the use of IoT applications, including a range of sensors for water and fuel tanks, grain silos, gates and irrigation control, as well as sheep and personal GPS trackers and automated weather stations,” he said.
“This will allow Western Australian agribusinesses to ‘try before they buy’ and to evaluate which technologies are best suited to their operation.”
NNN Co will provide LoRaWAN connectivity and its N2N-DL data platform. NNNCo founder & CEO Rob Zagarella said it enabled the company to “integrate best-of-breed solutions and bring them into an interoperable system that anyone can access.”
The platform was named Infrastructure & Platforms Innovation of the Year at the 2019 NSW iAwards in Sydney, presented in May by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).
NNNCo describes it as a middleware database platform that solves complexity, cost and risk barriers of IoT. “It decodes, decrypts and delivers data from any device, source or network and applies a common language that enables data to easily integrate into any customer system or analytics platform,” NNNCo says.
“N2N-DL has achieved considerable traction with government and enterprise customers including Gold Coast City Council, Newcastle City Council and Hunter Water. It has also been selected by major Australian IT distributor, Dicker Data, to be part of the core IoT product for its 5,000-strong reseller networks alongside Cisco hardware and Microsoft’s Azure analytics platform.”
