Netmore Group and Vantage Towers, a provider of telecommunications tower infrastructure to the European market, recently announced a strategic partnershipto deliver national LoRaWAN connectivity across Portugal.
Like many regions around the world, addressing water scarcity is a leading initiative across Portugal and a leading use case for low power wide area network (LPWAN) sensing technology. Record droughts this year have forced significant water restrictions and strained the operations of water utilities throughout the country, particularly in the southernmost Algarve region, where reservoirs are only 20% full on average.
Additionally, Portugal loses nearly a third of its water through leaks, theft or illicit use, according to ERSAR, the country’s national water supply and sanitation agency. To combat these challenges, water utilities are adopting Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and within those initiatives, deploying LoRaWAN technology for water metering, leak detection, and to collect data identifying usage irregularities.
Through this partnership, Netmore will deploy gateways on Vantage Towers’ extensive infrastructure to support its Network-as-a-Service offering as it expands and densifies its already operational carrier-grade public LoRaWAN network in the region. Vantage Towers operates over 84,000 sites across ten European markets, including more than 3,500 towers in Portugal. It provides high-quality, resilient infrastructure for connectivity, partnering with operators to expand network coverage, capacity and services.
Netmore’s Network-as-a-Service model is designed to meet the demands of utilities, application providers, and device manufacturers. It simplifies network connectivity, which makes it possible for organisations to easily connect to existing LoRaWAN networks for growing use cases such as water metering, waste management, or environmental monitoring, among others, while avoiding the challenges of building out network infrastructure and the costs associated with it.
Enhanced LoRaWAN connectivity in the region will enable utilities and other organizations to glean new insights from their infrastructure, operations, and assets to make data-driven decisions, increase operational efficiency, and optimise processes.
“Connectivity is essential to build an inclusive digital society and our partnership with Netmore will improve the operations of critical sectors of the economy and drive sustainability forward,” commented Paolo Favaro, Vantage Towers Portugal Managing Director, Vantage Towers.
LoRaWAN adoption continues to grow globally because of its technical strengths in providing long-range connectivity at a low cost, with low power consumption, and flexible deployment models. The ease of deployment and cost-effectiveness of LoRaWAN now makes it possible to build networks and add sensors even where it was previously infeasible or cost-prohibitive, which increasingly leads to it being chosen for massive IoT deployments.
“Forward-thinking organisations are seeking out new ways to achieve sustainability, optimise operations, and reduce costs – but to do that, they need robust and accessible network connectivity,” said Talis Talor, Managing Director, Netmore Portugal. “Our partnership with Vantage Towers combines our secure, future-proof LoRaWAN network and global IoT expertise with Vantage Towers’ widespread infrastructure across Portugal, enabling digital transformation at scale to support water utilities in AMI and other use cases that ultimately improve quality of life.”
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