The quiet power behind smart tech
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
WiFi, Bluetooth, and mobile networks are familiar names in wireless communication - but there’s a fourth contender transforming everything from city water systems to African wildlife conservation.
LPWAN - or Low Power Wide Area Network technology - is used when you need to send small amounts of data over long distances, using very little power.
We head to rural Portugal where it's used for solar and water systems, and from conservation parks in Africa to find out how this low-cost network could become the most influential wireless tech of them all.
Produced and presented by Alastair Leithead
(Image: An adult female Iberian Lynx named Lava with GPS tracking collar on January 12, 2023 in Toledo, Spain. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service from Portugal with me, |
| 0:06.3 | Alastair Leithead. Three key technologies keep us connected, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile phones. |
| 0:13.9 | But today we're exploring another you might not have heard of. |
| 0:17.7 | We have been erecting the fourth pillar of the wireless data communication scene. And I would |
| 0:22.5 | even claim that we will be the most influential among all those four technologies. It's called low power |
| 0:29.9 | wide area network technology. The acronym is LPWAN. Not the snappiest, but it has an amazing range of uses. |
| 0:39.9 | From letting city managers know when to empty their recycling bins... |
| 0:45.8 | So this is the water being pumped up here. |
| 0:48.9 | To helping smart cities provide water and connecting household meters. |
| 0:59.7 | It's helping to track Iberian links and automatically tell drivers when they're crossing the road. This little box is smaller than your Wi-Fi router. |
| 1:05.3 | Yeah. It just sits alongside it. And above all, it's helping me, making sure my off-grid water |
| 1:10.7 | supply isn't too salty, |
| 1:12.6 | ensuring my infinity pool flows infinitely and keeping the olive trees watered. |
| 1:24.4 | My wife and I bought this off-grid property on the southwestern coast of Portugal's Alentejo a few years ago and moved here during COVID. |
| 1:33.5 | We've just finished building what we call an eco-lux tourist lodge for visitors to enjoy the calm, the quiet and the wild beaches which attracted us here. |
| 1:43.3 | But providing enough power and water for 20 plus guests with no municipal connection has been hard. |
| 1:50.5 | Our solar system needs closely watching when it rains and we blend salty borehole water with rain for drinking water. |
| 1:58.0 | That is how we stumbled across L.P. Wang. |
| 2:01.6 | Okay, tools in the back. |
| 2:03.6 | Let's head down the hill. |
| 2:05.6 | I'm taking John Archer from Remex Technologies deep into the valley, |
| 2:10.6 | where one of our sources of water is collected in a pillow tank, a giant bag. |
... |
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