Digital infrastructure for smart cities: ZENNER at the Smart Country Convention 2026 (SCCON)

Press

Smart Water as the foundation for a connected municipal infrastructure

SCCON 2026 will take place in Berlin from 13 to 15 October and is Germany’s leading event for digital administration and smart cities. At the exhibition, ZENNER International GmbH & Co. KG will use practical solutions to demonstrate how digital infrastructure lays the foundations for resilient cities. The focus of this year’s trade fair presentation is also the topic of Smart Water.

Saarbrücken, September 2026. Climate change, heavy rainfall, periods of drought and rising operating costs are increasingly presenting cities and local authorities with new challenges. To be able to respond effectively, smart cities need reliable real-time data. Digitalised water infrastructure plays a central role in this: it provides important data for proactive operations whilst also laying the foundations for resilient and connected cities. The open wireless standard LoRaWAN has become a key technology in this context.

At SCCON 2026, ZENNER International will present solutions for scalable Smart City infrastructures and the digitalisation of the water sector.

Digital infrastructure with Smart Water

ZENNER manufactures smart metering technology for water, heating and gas, and is constantly developing it further, always tailoring it to the requirements of water suppliers. As a Smart Water Solution Provider, the company currently offers a portfolio of solutions that enables water suppliers to digitise numerous processes in water management, ranging from digital meter reading and water quality monitoring to soil moisture monitoring and flood protection.

“We take a holistic view of the digitalisation of the water sector: by ‘Smart Water Rollout’, we mean not only digitalised and automated data collection, but also complementary IoT solutions that enable networks to be operated safely and environmental data to be monitored,”

explains René Claussen, Head of Metering Systems, IoT and Digital Solutions at ZENNER.

A requirement for implementation is an appropriately interconnected digital infrastructure comprising measurement technology, sensors, gateways and IoT platforms. Meters and sensors record relevant measurement data, which is securely transmitted via LoRaWAN wireless technology and consolidated in platforms such as B.One Element IoT by ZENNER via the Internet of Things (IoT). There, the collected information is analysed, visualised and made available for various applications in the water sector.

From water to the Smart City

The same digital infrastructure can also be used to implement various use cases outside the water sector. With minimal additional effort, it can also be used for Smart City applications and expanded step by step. These include, for example, the monitoring and control of street lighting (smart lighting), the monitoring of local distribution transformer stations, the recording of energy consumption or fill levels, the intelligent control of radiator thermostats in buildings, or the analysis of weather and environmental data.

Jan-Philipp Exner, Smart City Expert at ZENNER sums it up:

“Anyone who introduces Smart Water solutions is simultaneously building the digital infrastructure for further Smart City applications.” Municipal utilities and local authorities can easily scale up the existing infrastructure in stages and implement different use cases on a shared platform. ZENNER’s modular portfolio ranges from metering technology and applications for water management to software and solutions for a resilient municipal infrastructure.

The ZENNER Group currently operates one of the world’s largest LoRaWAN networks, with more than eleven million connected devices and network coverage in 15 countries. To date, ZENNER has successfully implemented more than 450 projects with municipal utilities, energy suppliers, municipalities and industrial companies.

You can meet the team from ZENNER International GmbH & Co. KG at Smart Country Convention 2026 in Hall 25, Booth 122.