IKB
Four years of engineering inside Innsbruck's city-wide IoT build. Infra, devices, codecs. Handed over completely, still on call.
IKB (Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe) is the municipal utility of Innsbruck, Austria, water, energy, waste, telecom. They had a Smart City build underway and needed engineering hands to help take it to city scale, not another slide deck about it.
Overview
IKB (Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe) is the municipal utility of Innsbruck, Austria, water, energy, waste, telecom. They had a Smart City build underway and needed engineering hands to help take it to city scale, not another slide deck about it.
What's the challenge?
Help take an in-flight Smart City build to city scale. Real streets, real devices from real vendors, none speaking the same dialect. LoRaWAN backbone on Kubernetes to harden and extend. Multi-manufacturer hardware to evaluate and integrate. Per-device uplink and downlink payloads to decode. Connectivity drops, divergent gateway firmwares, datasheets that lied.
Every device, its own dialect. And every device, its own clock.
IKB had work underway when we joined. Extending the LoRaWAN backbone to production scale was tractable. Writing codecs against datasheets that lied was not. Every manufacturer handled packets its own way. Some devices spoke daily, some quarterly, some only when a water meter detected a leak. A wrong byte cost a full cycle to verify. We built a per-vendor codec workbench, captured real packets, replayed them offline.
What We Did
We joined IKB’s in-flight Smart City build as part of the engineering taking it to city scale, against multi-vendor reality where no two devices speak the same dialect. Our lane was infrastructure and devices. Year one: extended the Kubernetes cluster running ChirpStack, field testing on water meters and cargo-bike trackers, the uplink decoders and downlink encoders, hardened the infra. Years two to four: we handed the platform over to IKB’s in-house team completely and stayed on as external support, new device integrations, the Grafana stack, field connectivity, manufacturer calls.
Outcomes
Production architecture
The diagram illustrates a simplified high-level architecture and omits confidential implementation and security details.
What We Learned
City-scale IoT is a coordination problem dressed up as a hardware problem. Protocols are tractable. Datasheets are not. Every vendor lies a little, every payload is its own dialect. Tight coordination across the whole stack is the only thing that works.
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