IKB
City-wide IoT backbone for Innsbruck. Built it, ran it, handed it off, still on call.
IKB (Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe) is the municipal utility of Innsbruck, Austria, water, energy, waste, telecom. They needed someone to build their Smart City programme, not write another slide deck about it.
Overview
IKB (Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe) is the municipal utility of Innsbruck, Austria, water, energy, waste, telecom. They needed someone to build their Smart City programme, not write another slide deck about it.
The Challenge
Greenfield IoT at city scale. Real streets, real devices from real vendors, none speaking the same dialect. LoRaWAN backbone on Kubernetes. 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.
Standing up the LoRaWAN backbone 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
City-scale IoT against multi-vendor reality where no two devices speak the same dialect. One team end-to-end, infra, decoder, device, vendor call, so nothing fell between the seams. Year one: Kubernetes cluster running ChirpStack, field testing on water meters and cargo-bike trackers, the uplink decoders and downlink encoders. Years two to four: handed the platform to IKB's in-house team and stayed on as 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. One team end-to-end is the only path that works.
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