Busan Remote Water Metering
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Seven years after the pilot, 27.7% of connections had a smart meter: 98.4% in Gangseo, 6.3% in Yeongdo. A city councillor had already challenged the cheap radio standard the utility picked at the start.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Busan · 💧 Water guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
Busan's Water Authority has been replacing analogue water meters with IoT smart meters since a 2018 pilot, running them over the city's own LoRa network alongside commercial NB-IoT. Meters report up to 24 times a day, sending consumption plus temperature, over-flow and backflow flags so leaks and abnormal flow surface between billing reads. Progress is slow and uneven: the authority's own December 2025 tally shows 101,053 of 365,229 connections converted, 27.7%, ranging from 98.4% in Gangseo to 6.3% in Yeongdo. A city councillor challenged the LoRa choice in 2023, citing weak reception and 12.6 billion won paid to one supplier.
📊 Impact
The authority's own status page reported 101,053 of 365,229 water connections on remote meters by December 2025 (27.7%), seven years after the pilot, with office-area coverage ranging from 98.4% in Gangseo to 6.3% in Yeongdo.
🎓 Lesson
A cheap radio standard picked at pilot stage can outlive its credibility: Busan was still funding LoRa terminal maintenance years after peer cities moved to NB-IoT.
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Compare this project
The radio is the cheapest rung. Who owns it, and what did it end up carrying?
A LoRaWAN network is coverage in a year for the price of a few dozen gateways, which is why so many cities have one. The interesting questions come afterwards: whose asset it is, and what it actually carries once the pilots are over.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | Owner, and the load it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citywide LoRaWAN Network & DOdata HubDortmund, 🇩🇪 | 2019 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Utility or public operator, City government | not public | The utility built it and then founded a subsidiary steered jointly with the city, so urban data stays in municipal hands. The workload is unglamorous: water meters in underground shafts. |
| SWM Citywide LoRaWAN IoT NetworkMunich, 🇩🇪 | 2018 | Live | Ongoing | Media | Utility or public operator | not public | The municipal utility owns it and opened it to outside businesses. Groundwater stations and substations report over it; the waste-container pilots have not been confirmed to scale. |
| Wiener Netze / Wien Energie LoRaWAN Sensor NetworkVienna, 🇦🇹 | 2019 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Utility or public operator | not public | The grid company and the energy utility own it, not the city. The one confirmed city use at scale is the waste authority tracking its containers. |
| Busan Remote Water MeteringBusan, 🇰🇷 | 2018 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Utility or public operator | not public | The city runs its own LoRa network — and a councillor challenged the choice years after peer cities had moved on. A cheap standard picked at pilot stage can outlive its credibility. |
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Busan Remote Water Metering” — Busan, South Korea. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/busan-smart-water-metering/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.