What were the key challenges in integrating IoT devices and analytics with the private network?

Speaker: Johnathan Lewis, Innovation Division Director, Miami Dade Aviation Department

The first and often hardest challenge is change—both technical change and human change. It’s not only about change management from a network or infrastructure perspective, but also about helping people adapt to a different way of doing things.

There has to be a period of adoption where teams evaluate risk and build confidence that this new approach can be trusted as a reliable connectivity tool. Getting everyone to take the time to understand the technology and feel comfortable trusting it was probably the biggest hurdle.

Once we moved past that, the remaining challenges were mostly related to interoperability. For example, when using IoT devices on LoRaWAN, how do you take those LoRaWAN devices and backhaul them into your private wireless network?

Another issue is that many LoRaWAN-type sensors rely on vendor-specific, subscription-based web portals. That means you can end up with separate dashboards for each vendor. Figuring out a way to aggregate all those data streams into one centralized location—rather than monitoring multiple disparate dashboards—was a significant challenge.

These were real hurdles, but they were challenges we were able to overcome fairly quickly.