What can you actually do with LoRaWAN?

I have written a lot of words about how LoRaWAN works. The modulation technique, the network architecture, the classes, the UK spectrum regulations. All of it useful context. But the question I keep getting asked, and the one I ask myself when I am trying to justify the infrastructure spend, is simpler: what can you actually do with this?

The honest answer is more interesting than I expected when I started researching it properly.

The LoRa Alliance’s 2025 end-of-year report puts 125 million LoRaWAN devices globally, growing at a 25% compound annual growth rate. That is not hobbyist numbers. That is infrastructure scale. The question worth asking is where all those devices are and what they are doing.

The obvious things

The most straightforward applications are also the most deployed. Smart water metering. Environmental monitoring. Asset tracking. These are the use cases LoRaWAN was designed for, and they work well precisely because the constraints of the technology match the constraints of the problem.

LoRaWAN has taken the lead as the top wireless technology for smart building and facility management, with utilities remaining the largest deployment vertical led by smart water. Yorkshire Water, for example, is running one of Europe’s largest LoRaWAN-based smart water metering projects, using the technology to monitor water consumption, detect leaks, and engage customers in conservation. The same technology, at a much smaller scale, could monitor the water usage at three sites across Greater Manchester.

Asset tracking is everywhere. The most popular LoRaWAN applications combine GPS and motion sensors into compact, low-power devices, deployed across construction equipment, containers, rental assets, and heavy machinery to provide 24/7 visibility even in remote environments where cellular signals fail. A GPS tracker that runs for years on a single battery and transmits location data via a network you operate yourself, rather than paying a monthly subscription to a third party, is a compelling proposition.

The agricultural applications

Agriculture is where some of the most interesting scale deployments are happening. The 2025 LoRa Alliance report highlights massive growth in livestock tracking, with deployments now reaching over 500,000 cattle in regions like Australia and New Zealand. The application makes sense: cattle on thousands of acres of pasture, no cellular coverage, long battery life requirements, and a need to know where animals are without employing someone to ride the perimeter daily.

Soil moisture monitoring, crop health sensing, irrigation optimisation, weather station networks. The agricultural use case is really a collection of monitoring problems that LoRaWAN solves cleanly: sensors in the ground or on equipment, transmitting small data packets infrequently, running for years without maintenance.

For a home with a garden, the same principle applies at a very different scale. A soil moisture sensor that tells you when to water rather than watering on a schedule, connected to a self-hosted ChirpStack instance that feeds data into Home Assistant, is a genuinely useful piece of infrastructure.

The satellite angle

This one caught me off guard. Two LoRa Alliance members, Lacuna Space and Plan-S, already operate commercial LoRaWAN services from low Earth orbit. Standard LoRaWAN end devices communicate with those satellites without modification. European regulators approved satellite-to-low-power device communications in 2025.

Standard LoRaWAN end devices. No modification. This is remarkable if you sit with it for a moment. The same sensor you might deploy in your back garden to monitor soil temperature can, in principle, communicate with a satellite passing overhead. The use cases are for remote terrain where ground gateways cannot go: oil pipelines, rail lines, open ocean tracking. But the underlying point is that the device does not change. The network extends to orbit and the device does not need to know.

The indoor location story

One of the more interesting recent directions is indoor positioning. GPS does not work indoors. Cellular and WiFi triangulation is imprecise and power-hungry. LoRaWAN offers a different approach: time difference of arrival (TDoA) using multiple gateways to triangulate the position of a tag without GPS, and without the tag needing to know its own location.

The application in smart buildings and facilities management is growing. LoRaWAN is being used in German cities and utilities for smart lighting, waste management, and environmental monitoring, leading to improved urban management and resource optimisation. In a warehouse or hospital, knowing where equipment is without staff having to manually look for it has obvious value.

The wildfire and emergency communication angle

Speakers at IoT Solutions World Congress 2025 shared real-world use cases including managing solar energy systems, assessing wildfire risks, optimising urban irrigation, and enabling life-saving automation in conflict zones.

The wildfire risk assessment application is particularly interesting. Deploying temperature, humidity, and wind sensors across terrain at risk of fire, without needing power or cellular infrastructure, and having those sensors transmit readings continuously for years on battery power. LoRaWAN is genuinely well suited to this. The data is small, the transmission interval can be every few minutes, and the geographic coverage from a single well-placed gateway is significant.

What I am actually planning to do with it

Reading through the large-scale applications is motivating, but the honest answer for a home network is more modest and more personal.

Environmental monitoring across three sites: temperature, humidity, air quality, water leak detection. A soil moisture sensor in the garden. A flood alert on the boiler room. Asset tracking on the bicycles. A weather station feeding into the dashboard that will eventually live on the February server.

None of this is revolutionary. But all of it is genuinely useful, all of it runs on infrastructure I own, and all of it generates data that accumulates over time into something interesting. The temperature profile of the house across seasons. The correlation between outdoor humidity and indoor air quality. Whether the boiler room is getting damp.

The large-scale use cases, the satellites and the cattle tracking and the smart city deployments, validate the technology. They demonstrate that it scales, that it is reliable, that the ecosystem is mature. But the reason I am building this is not to track livestock across thousands of acres. It is to understand the physical environment I actually live and work in, using infrastructure I actually control.

That turns out to be a perfectly reasonable use of a protocol that is simultaneously being used to monitor Rotterdam’s port traffic and communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit.