Mainova Citywide LoRaWAN Network
The radio network most of Frankfurt's smart-city projects run on is not the city's. Mainova, the municipal utility, switched on a citywide LoRaWAN on 23 June 2020 with about 20 gateways spread across the city area; by late 2021 the operator counted roughly 60. It began as meter-reading infrastructure — heat and water meters — and was then opened to sensing work: tree soil moisture with automatic watering, waste-container fill levels, air quality, and a 2021 pilot with the transport operator VGF detecting vehicles blocking tram tracks.
🎓 Lesson
Two things are worth separating here. The gateway count comes from the operator and is checkable; the figure of roughly 7,000 sensors that circulates in Frankfurt coverage does not appear in either Mainova release and is reported by the press, so it is not stated as fact here. And the ownership matters more than either number: a utility built the network for its own metering business and rents the surplus, which is why the city's water, parking and lighting projects all describe the same radio layer as a given rather than as something they procured.
📖 Terms in this entry: LoRaWAN · Urban sensor network · Adaptive traffic signals
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Mainova Citywide LoRaWAN Network” — Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/frankfurt-lorawan-network/ (last verified 2026-08-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.