INDUSTRY // PUBLIC SECTOR & SMART CITY
Smart city infrastructure that runs at city scale, not pilot scale.
IKB, Innsbruck's municipal utility for water, energy, waste, and telecom, had a Smart City build underway and needed engineering hands that ship, not another slide deck. We worked inside that build for four years: hardening the LoRaWAN infrastructure, evaluating and integrating multi-vendor hardware, writing the per-device codecs. We handed the platform over to IKB's in-house team completely, and stayed on call.
Book a thirty-minute call“Smart city projects die in the gap between the pilot and the city. Twenty sensors on a test bench prove nothing about ten thousand on lamp posts.”
What we build in this industry
IKB is the engagement this page stands on. Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe runs the critical infrastructure of a city: water, energy, waste, telecom. Their Smart City build was already moving when we joined, which is its own discipline: no greenfield, no rewrite fantasies, just an in-flight system that had to reach city scale, with IKB’s own people driving it.
Our lane in that build, over four years: hardening the LoRaWAN infrastructure on Kubernetes, evaluating and integrating multi-vendor hardware, and writing the uplink decoders and downlink encoders every new device type needed. We handed the platform over completely to IKB’s in-house team, documented, and stayed on call. Public infrastructure should not depend on its contractor’s availability, and this one does not.
Public sector work has a reputation for slideware. Our position is the opposite: the deliverable is a running system the utility’s own team operates.
Engineering inside in-flight builds
The IKB shape: join a project that is already moving, own clearly cut lanes (infrastructure, device integration, codecs), hand them over completely, and stay useful without making yourself permanent.
IoT platform engineering
LoRaWAN and sensor-network backbones, device management, data pipelines, and the integration work between vendors who did not plan to talk to each other.
Honest feasibility before procurement
Workshops and technical due diligence that rule out the wrong ideas before they cost a budget cycle. We have told institutions 'no' on most of a technology wishlist, in writing.
What makes this industry hard
Pilots do not predict city scale
Radio coverage, battery budgets, and data volumes behave differently at ten thousand devices than at twenty. Scaling is not a bigger pilot, it is different engineering.
Multi-vendor reality
Public infrastructure is bought in pieces from vendors with conflicting protocols and incentives. Someone has to own the integration layer end to end.
The contractor must be removable
Public systems outlive contracts. We build, document, and hand over so the operator owns the system, then stay on call instead of staying indispensable.
Shipped work in this industry
One engagement, one city, four years inside the build. Handed over completely; IKB's team runs the platform.
