Farm-wide Wi-Fi for broadacre agriculture
Smart farming needs connectivity, but mobile signal disappears away from towns. Long-range Wi-Fi base stations gave one property blanket coverage — including to moving machinery.
The problem
Smart farming and agricultural technologies are completely reliant on connectivity — machine telemetry, data transfer, remote support. In most regional and rural areas of Australia, mobile signal is virtually non-existent away from towns and major roads. Satellite carries high latency, low bandwidth and expensive data, and LoRa or low-power networks suit only tiny amounts of data. Worker safety was a further concern: staff needed a way to reach emergency services.
What was done
Traditional access points reach a few hundred metres — enough for the homestead and machinery sheds, not much else. Altai long-range Wi-Fi base stations were deployed around the property instead, working like a mobile network with integrated wireless backhaul to the internet connection. A low-powered repeater mounted on a vehicle or machine extends coverage as it moves, and a single LoRa gateway on one of the base stations picks up low-powered sensor devices.
How it turned out
Base stations can be mast, tower, trailer or skid mounted and run fully self-contained on solar where mains power isn't available. Blanket coverage enabled the smart farming technologies, and brought Wi-Fi calling, SMS, email, internet, CCTV and sensors with it. Repeaters hand over between base stations, so coverage follows the machinery and the repeater can be swapped between vehicles.
“The solution was extremely cost effective compared to a private 4G LTE network or anything else which we were looking at. All of our existing phones and Wi-Fi equipment just connected easily. We now have internet access to the vehicles and headers across the entire property.”
Deployed at the time
As named in the original case study. Some of it is superseded, or was never in our range.
- Altai Super Wi-Fi base stations — no model published in the source
- Vehicle or machine-mounted repeater
- A single LoRa gateway on one base station
What we'd specify today
Current equivalents from our catalogue for this kind of site — not a statement about the hardware installed.
Where this came from
Transcribed from iDatanet's published case study. The source names no model numbers and quotes no cost figure; the range figures above are the source's own. Products listed under "what we'd specify today" are current equivalents from our catalogue, not a statement about what was installed.