What you’ll read: By leveraging the majestic Scandinavian landscape and providing unique, real-world case studies, Telia personalized its IoT pitch for its core audience.
Telia had a tall order. The Scandinavian telecom company needed to boost the adoption of its Internet of Things (IoT) product line while relating its benefits to local business owners. IoT is more than just putting the internet in your coffee maker, though — it’s a sophisticated suite of tools that can be tailored to a variety of data-gathering sensors, automated machinery, and other gadgets to suit any business’ needs.
Telia needed to convey information about its low-power-wide-area (LPWA) network solutions. Naturally, it leaned into the product’s unique selling point: the ability to be set up anywhere within the lush, sweeping hills, rocky fjords, and stormy coasts of the Nordic and Baltic regions that the company serves.
Connecting the Internet to Nature
Typically, blog posts involving anything internet-related open with a big stock photo of racks of networking hardware or a close-up of a computer monitor dotted with generic lines of code. Telia took a different tack with its blog post “IoT in hard-to-reach places.” Immediately the eye is drawn to an image of dense forestry split by power lines running toward rolling mountains crested by a cloudy sky.
It makes sense: Telia’s LPWA IoT networks are built for low power consumption and data usage so that businesses can set them up anywhere in the region, no matter how remote. With a single image, Telia leverages the striking beauty of the local environment to inform its customers that this product can be used anywhere.
Frigid Coasts and Sewer Rats
To showcase what the LPWA IoT network can do for its customers, Telia leaned on three different case studies, all framed around practical use cases built to take advantage of the region’s defining characteristics.
Ratel: Too many rats in the sewers is a problem for a city like Copenhagen, so pest control company Ratel devised an electronic trap to control the rodent population more efficiently. Ratel wanted to connect these traps across a network to track trap effectiveness and status, but as anyone who’s been inside an underground parking garage knows, getting any kind of reliable signal that far down is nearly impossible.
Ratel teamed up with Telia to build a system of narrowband IoT devices that they could set and forget deep underground. Ratel can then send data to its customers on how many rats are killed, whether the sewers have flooded, and whether trap components need to be replaced.
Yepzon: Winters along the Finnish archipelago are harsh, with strong gusts and foggy skies that make navigation difficult. The Finnish Maritime Authority uses navigation markers so boats can find their way back to the coast. These markers naturally shift around during stormy weather — meaning these markers need to be manually located and returned to their original position every spring.
To solve this problem, Yepzon constructed a series of “smart” navigation markers that use Telia’s narrowband IoT technology to provide precise GPS coordinates for each marker, no matter how many miles offshore they end up. They’re powered by solar panels, so Yepzon can count on their continued operation for years to come.
Heimdall Power: While green energy like wind and solar are better for the environment, they’re not as reliable as options like coal or gas. Heimdall Power needed a way to maximize power usage on the grid, so the company built sensors that could be placed along power lines to gather data across the grid. Then, it would feed that data to the Telia narrowband IoT network, allowing Heimdall Power to monitor the entire grid and increase capacity in real-time.
A Shifting Approach
A 2013 report by Telia predicted that the IoT market would grow by 30% by 2018 — an updated report found that number ended up closer to 15%. While IoT adoption within homes (your connected fridges, air conditioners, and so on) has stalled, Telia has found that businesses and public projects have embraced the technology to improve their products and enhance their cities, their population, and their local environment.
Rather than focusing on how this technology can improve individual lives, Telia has harnessed the ways organizations can use IoT to improve their core offerings while retaining the natural beauty of their surroundings. These stories may not be as glamorous or flashy as unlocking your front door with your smartphone, but they’re compelling showcases of a variety of IoT applications, with real-world use cases and quantifiable results that provide a positive impact on everyone’s lives.