About Flood Network
Flood Network was a project to monitor flooding using low-cost Internet of Things sensors. This page records some of the journey.
Timeline
- Feb 2014 Oxford Flood Network starts monitoring flooding using IoT
- Sep 2014 Partnership with Nominet
- Jun 2015 Joins the Bethnal Green Ventures summer 2015 cohort. Company formed.
- Oct 2015 Joins the Ordnance Survey Geovation programme
- Mar 2016 LoRaWAN and The Things Network support added
- 2017–2019 LoRaWAN grows. Adopted by Bradford Council, Cardiff and Slow the Flow.
- 2020–2024 Wind-down. Flood Network Ltd closed in 2023.
- 2026 The work carries on with SOFLAG in South Oxford.
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, and the Environment Agency has been under-funded for decades, so the customer base had little money.
From a technology point of view the LoRaWAN ecosystem has been successful, but the promised national low-power wide-area coverage never materialised (LoRaWAN, Sigfox, N-Wave, NB-IoT, LTE-M). Building a wireless operator on licence-exempt spectrum seems to be too big an investment for the risk, so these networks have stayed self-serve in many countries. Building your own infrastructure upsets the cost model significantly, but it does mean you're not at the mercy of the operators to reach literal backwaters.
What would you do differently?
I would definitely find someone with better business development skills who could find us a profitable market. Coming from a technology background, I was absorbed early on by the challenges of making sensors, 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, and it has continued to serve me in my career. These days I'm responsible for the manufacturing network strategy at a major automotive company, carrying more sensor traffic than I ever dreamed.