Navigating the energy debate: Challenges and solutions | Martin Wood, Adrian La Porta and John Dyson

The UK has established ambitious targets to reduce carbon by 2050.

LoRaWAN is a long-range, wide-area network on a different frequency band to WiFi.As a result, it doesn’t compete with cell phones and other devices connected via WiFi on construction sites.

As LoRaWAN is very long-range, it enables construction sites to be quite remote, representing great potential for Australia where it’s not unusual to travel five to ten hours to a site.Europe is already covered in LoRaWAN with something like 10,000 gateways across Europe, over 1,000 in Australia, and around 800 in the U.S. One barrier which presents for the latter, is that their cellular network, which runs across states, makes it difficult to talk between networks.As such, we need to remove that network issue from IoT construction.

In the case of LoRaWAN, private networks can be established, in addition to the public ones.Lamont believes these private networks are where we’ll see real genesis and IoT technology emerging in construction.

WiFi is full, however this would make millions of IP addresses available to us..

This type of technology is currently being looked at with great interest by mining sites.In particular, she reminds us that the term DfMA does not refer to the end product.

(traditional and alternative structures)., but rather the choices we make upfront relating to the design, manufacture and assembly process..

There isn’t a hierarchy with any of this, she says, mentioning the term ‘modular’ construction.Each industrialised construction technique is just another tool in the toolkit, with varying degrees of suitability depending on the particular scenario.. She also raises the point that some people feel threatened by the industrialised construction terminology, as a result of not having the necessary skill set.