Industrial IoT

Industrial IoT Consulting for Utilities and Infrastructure

Low-cost sensors on cellular and LPWAN networks can monitor assets that never justified a full RTU. I help you choose, connect, secure and integrate them, into SCADA, the cloud, or both.

Use Cases

Where IIoT Earns Its Keep

IIoT doesn't replace SCADA. It extends visibility to places where a full RTU, power supply and radio link would cost more than the information is worth.

Water and wastewater

Reservoir and tank levels, network pressure and flow logging, sewer level and overflow detection, water quality probes and smart meters.

Energy and renewables

Condition monitoring of transformers, pumps and rotating plant, and asset health at distributed sites.

Infrastructure and environment

Environmental monitoring, asset condition and location tracking across large, unpowered or hard-to-reach areas.

Services

What I Deliver

Connectivity strategy

Choosing between LoRaWAN (private or public networks), NB-IoT and LTE-M on Australian carriers, 4G, and satellite IoT for remote sites, based on coverage, battery life, latency and the cost per device per year.

Device and platform selection

Sensors, gateways, network servers and IoT platforms such as AWS IoT Core and Azure IoT Hub, assessed against your requirements rather than a vendor's roadmap.

Payload decoding and integration

Bespoke software that decodes custom device payloads via MQTT and delivers clean, named data into your SCADA system, historian or cloud platform.

Device management at scale

Provisioning, certificate-based identity, firmware updates, battery and health monitoring, and decommissioning for fleets of hundreds or thousands of devices.

Security by design

IIoT devices treated as their own zone in your IEC 62443 model and never bridged into the control network, with vendor cloud services and supply chain risk assessed up front.

Turning data into decisions

Dashboards, alarms and analytics that put the new data in front of the people who act on it; see Digitalisation & Cloud.

Approach

From Pilot to Fleet

  1. Define the problem and the value

    Which decision will the data change, and what is that worth? This keeps the business case honest.

  2. Pilot

    A small number of devices on the shortlisted network and platform, in the real environment.

  3. Evaluate

    Coverage, battery life, data quality, integration effort and support load, measured rather than taken from data sheets.

  4. Design for scale

    Naming, provisioning, security, integration and support processes that work for thousands of devices, not ten.

  5. Roll out and operate

    Staged deployment, monitoring of the fleet itself, and clear ownership between operations, IT and OT.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Can IIoT sensors replace RTUs?

For monitoring, sometimes. For control, safety functions, or anything needing guaranteed low-latency communications, no: that remains the job of RTUs, PLCs and SCADA. IIoT works best adding measurements alongside SCADA, not replacing it.

Should we use LoRaWAN or NB-IoT?

It depends on coverage and ownership. LoRaWAN lets you run your own network and gateways, which suits concentrated areas and remote sites without good cellular coverage. NB-IoT and LTE-M use carrier networks, which suits widely scattered devices in covered areas. A mix of both is common.

How does IIoT data get into SCADA?

Usually through MQTT: devices or network servers publish to a broker, a decoder turns each device's payload into named, scaled values, and those values are delivered to SCADA or the historian through a supported interface. Getting that middle layer right is most of the work.

Are IIoT devices a security risk?

They can be: they are often internet-connected and managed through a vendor's cloud. That is manageable if they are kept off the control network, authenticated with certificates, kept up to date, and treated as their own zone in your risk assessment.

What happened to IoT devices that used 3G?

Australia's 3G networks closed in 2023–24, so devices that relied on 3G stopped communicating unless they could fall back to 4G. Replacements should use 4G, LTE-M or NB-IoT, and new deployments should check each carrier's network roadmap.

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