Stunning coastlines and verdant mountain scenery make the Cook Islands a popular tourist destination. This tourism industry has contributed to a decade of economic growth, and in 2021 the government of this nation in the South Pacific introduced the SMART Economy Initiative to create ‘smart’ island networks.
Around the world, the Internet of Things (IoT) is used for energy metering, road traffic management, street lighting operation and environmental controls. Not all IoT nodes need the fast data transfer of a 5G network, and in the Cook Islands, the tropical and mountainous terrain means installation is not practical.
LoRaWAN (long-range wide area network) technology was selected for the Cook Islands’ Smart Island project. The low-power protocol uses the unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band for bi-directional communication. It has a range of 5-7km in rural areas and transmission speeds are up to 27kbit/s. This is less quick...