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What if every meter in a city became a tiny base station? That simple shift unlocks coverage where towers fail, slashes operating costs, and floods the grid with the data it needs to stay resilient under the weight of electrification. We sit down with Wirepas CEO Teppo Hemiä to unpack how a fully decentralized mesh lets devices make local decisions on channel, power, and routing—no single point of failure, no shouting across long distances, and no fragile tuning from a central controller.
We trace the journey from early cellular breakthroughs to an edge-first architecture built for smart grids, smart metering, and industrial IoT at massive scale. Tippo explains why electrification flips the data problem on its head: rooftop solar, EV charging, and dynamic tariffs demand millions of reliable data points and two-way control. Real-world case studies from Oslo’s million-node deployment to India’s 300-million-meter landscape show how the mesh holds up in basements, metal cabinets, slums with extreme density, and even container ships where multipath overwhelms conventional radios. By embedding backhaul into a fraction of meters, deployments get simpler, cheaper, and faster—devices self-form the network and keep it healthy.
We dig into economics and standards too. With NR+ aligning the technology to the 5G family, utilities avoid lock-in while gaining a path to sub-second reads and grid-grade reliability. A new low-power milestone—mesh routers sipping around 20 microamps on Nordic’s latest silicon—opens the door to battery-powered routing and multi-year autonomy. The takeaway is clear: decentralization, spectrum efficiency, and autonomy are the keystones for a resilient, data-rich energy future. Subscribe, share with a colleague building smart energy systems, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling IoT for the grid.
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