About Flood Network

Timeline

Feb 2014 - Oxford Flood Network Project starts monitoring flooding using IoT
Sep 2014 - Nominet partnership
Jun 2015 - Joined Bethnal Green Ventures Summer 2015 cohort. Company Formed.
Oct 2015 - Joined Ordnance Survey Geovation Programme
Mar 2016 - LoRaWAN and Things Network compatibility added
2017-2019 - Growth of LoRaWAN. Adoption by Bradford Council, Cardiff, Slow the Flow
2020-2024 - Wind down and closure

What happened?

The main reason for failure was inexperience. Startups are hard aren’t they?

The second biggest reason was choosing an application that was important, but not very profitable. Local authorities are still under financial pressure in 2024, the Environment Agency has been under-funded for decades, so the customer base had little money.

From a technology perspective the LoRaWAN ecosystem has been successful, but the promised LPWAN national coverage never materialised (LoRaWAN, Sigfox, N-Wave, NB-IOT, LTE-M). Creating a wireless operator from license-exempt spectrum seems to be too high an investment vs risk, so LPWAN has remained a self-serve network model in many countries. Building your own infrastructure upsets the cost model significantly, but does mean you’re not at the mercy of the operators to reach literal backwaters.

What would you do differently?

Definitely I would find someone with better business development skills who could find us a profitable market. Having come from a technology background I was absorbed by the challenges early on creating sensors and learning embedded hardware development and learning about hydrology. What was the point unless we had a profitable target market?

Well, I guess the point is that I learnt a lot which has continued to serve me in my career. I am now in a position where I’m responsible for the manufacturing IoT platform and strategy for a major automotive company.