Citywide LoRaWAN Network & DOdata Hub
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.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
✎ Updated 20 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 3 sources. What changed →
Dortmund's municipal utility DEW21 built a LoRaWAN radio network across the city and reported near-complete outdoor coverage by the end of 2019; on 29 October 2019 it founded DOdata GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary co-steered with the city, to run the network and a smart-city data hub under municipal control. The concrete workload is unglamorous: around 2,500 water meters sitting in underground shafts are being converted to daily remote reading over the network, with several hundred running in test operation first, alongside pilots in parking, waste fill levels and CO2 monitoring. All coverage and rollout figures are the operator's own, and no public inventory states how many sensors actually transmit today.
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 →🎓 Lesson
A radio network is the cheapest rung of the sensor ladder: Dortmund bought coverage within a year, then spent the following years finding applications that pay. The distinctive part is governance — a utility subsidiary jointly steered with the city so that urban data stays in municipal hands.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 7 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 7 addressable claims, 3 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 7
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-21fcbd43d6700c3c
quantitative
built a LoRaWAN radio network across the city and reported near-complete outdoor coverage by the end of 2019
Sources carrying this claim
clm-917da499f3717c1e
quantitative
on 29 October 2019 it founded DOdata GmbH
Sources carrying this claim
clm-f3e87677f2f8a214
descriptive
a wholly owned subsidiary co-steered with the city
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5d313a5d442867b8
quantitative
around 2,500 water meters sitting in underground shafts are being converted to daily remote reading
Sources carrying this claim
clm-346c5af4280f44ef
descriptive
several hundred running in test operation first
Sources carrying this claim
clm-b9e0ce86dfefb6c9
quantitative
pilots in parking, waste fill levels and CO2 monitoring
Sources carrying this claim
clm-fd957d972cb624c7
descriptive
a utility subsidiary jointly steered with the city so that urban data stays in municipal hands
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:6c6cb33c7f47e2ab20dda0436abc6aa6fbac694b7a6cd99aa2b2e139914e1c2b
- 7
- of 7 claims mapped
- 3
- source dossiers
- 1
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- DOdata GmbH (wholly owned DEW21 subsidiary, co-steered with the City of Dortmund)
- Actor types
- utility, city-government
- Funding model
- utility
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
3 source dossiers
stadt+werk — Daten-Management-Tochter gegründet
- Stable source ID
src-c8ac558a9187d284- Publisher
- Name not classified · stadt-und-werk.de
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-10-28
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-15
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Trade press on the founding: DOdata GmbH established 29 October 2019 as a 100% DEW21 subsidiary, jointly managed with the City of Dortmund; leadership and data-sovereignty rationale.
Themen-Magazin — DOdata, der SmartCity DataHub für Dortmund
- Stable source ID
src-c270b594da5097d6- Publisher
- Name not classified · themen-magazin.de
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-15
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Interview-based trade article carrying the operator's figures: near-100% outdoor LoRaWAN coverage by end of 2019, ~2,500 shaft water meters slated for remote reading with several hundred in test operation, parking/waste pilots.
DOdata (operator site)
- Stable source ID
src-2dd3806168034f5d- Publisher
- Name not classified · dodata.solutions
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-15
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Operator's own site, live in 2026: positions DOdata as data hub and LoRaWAN operator for Dortmund; lists parking, waste, water and air-quality use cases without deployment counts.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
Continue exploring
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. |
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Citywide LoRaWAN Network & DOdata Hub” — Dortmund, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/dortmund-lorawan-dodata/ (last verified 2026-08-15). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.