The shores of Chini Lake, in Malaysia, are home to around 500 indigenous Orang Asli residents spread across six villages. There was no mobile data coverage in the area – this wasn’t just an issue for communication, it also limited the use of flood-detection sensors.

The problem was, the ground was too swampy, hard to access and unstable for the typical connectivity towers to be installed. But the team at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia had an idea – what about using a balloon instead?

Discover more about the ISIF-Asia supported low-power, Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) they installed on the balloon – the full technical report is now available on the Foundation site.