IoT sensor on Communication mast

You mean, you want to come 5 to 10 years late to the LoRaWan market?

In my area, all the water meters are remotely read and they use LoRaWan repeaters located on street signs or lamppost every 50 to 100 meters. This kind of product for example: https://www.birdz.com/Produit/bridge-lorawan-atex/

Birdz does generate revenue, but it's a well installed company and they have to bear the cost of "using the public space" which amounts to 10€ per mast and per year (in French: https://sigerly.fr/2018/07/12/7893/), so 65000€ per year just to start operating.

Good luck taking them off their market.

The crux of it has already been expressed by  obones 

This kind of venture needs serious money invested for the long term. Many large and competent organisations are already well into this kind of business.

To compete you would need to be able to match the resources they can bring to bear or have a brilliant and novel idea.

But it's the resources that really matter - brilliant ideas are cheap and plentiful.

MK

Thanks. It seems you have used the water meter installation as an example and that is perfect. But we still have other use cases that can be explored.

Birdz exists and they serve their customers and their presence does not have to deter the emergence of a competitor. 
There are numerous examples in history where later comers into the industry displaced existing players - just saying.

yes, very correct.
By and large, existing and well established companies target high-end customers .
In this case, there is room for targeting low-end customers.
This has always been proven to be a solid business strategy and gives the opportunity to draw in customers in the high-end.

There are other companies like Birdz scattered around the world.All doing similar things. Key is customer engagement to get "locked in".

You can also leverage open source to do it: https://meshtastic.org/

Or go the packaged solutions route: meshtastic.org/.../

Yes, correct. Again, thanks for the suggestions.
But it is totally not the case that because of companies scattered around doing similar things the emergence of new company is not needed.
Innovation proceeds on efforts along different fronts.

To be clear, I am not saying those 5-10 years of effort are not there or won't be a factor. In as much as one can refine ones use-case there 
are always opportunities for entry into existing market.

Thank you! The traffic use-case was just an example. One could add other services based on regional needs and market analysis.

You description mirrored an offer to a local rural business, https://www.earthnetworks.com/ Asked to establish a monitoring station at the local grocery store.

Like EV charge points, the company believed the location was ideal for coverage.

Thank you for the suggestions and input!