Famalicão Smart Parking: LoRaWAN Sensor Deployment

Deployment Snapshot (Cumulative)

Field	Value
Client	Multiconnect unip. Lda, operating the CWAY smart city platform
HQ	Rua do Souto Longo 122, 4770-539 Arnoso Santa Maria, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Braga district, Portugal
Industry	Smart city systems integration and IoT consulting
Deployment footprint	Municipal smart parking across Famalicão, Esposende, Barcelos, and Guimarães in the Braga/Porto region
Documented orders	5 documented orders spanning December 2023 to March 2026 (Fleximodo's internal order count for this client runs higher — see note under the Order Timeline)
Products deployed	IoT Parking Sensor Standard — NB-IoT (in-ground) and LoRaWAN (in-ground)
Connectivity	NB-IoT via Vodafone (initial rollout) pivoting to LoRaWAN with Fleximodo backend/CityPortal (later orders)
Cumulative NB-IoT sensors	Approximately 684 units (December 2023) plus a further 50-80 units (January 2024) plus a Vodafone-connected top-up (October 2025)
Platform	Multiconnect's own CWAY platform for the NB-IoT fleet; Fleximodo CityPortal backend for the LoRaWAN fleet
Relationship span	Repeat customer since December 2023, still actively ordering as of March 2026

The Client: Multiconnect and the CWAY Platform

Multiconnect unipessoal Lda is a Portuguese smart city systems integrator founded in 2013 by CEO Nuno Oliveira, based in Vila Nova de Famalicão in northern Portugal's Braga district. Operating under the CWAY smart city brand, the company provides IoT analytics, environmental monitoring, and smart parking infrastructure to Portuguese municipalities across the Braga/Porto metropolitan region — including Famalicão, Esposende, Barcelos, and Guimarães.

Despite its small size (1-10 employees), Multiconnect operates at remarkable scale through deep municipal relationships. The company is the technical delivery partner for B-Smart Famalicão, the municipality's digital transformation programme, positioning it as the deployment partner for smart city infrastructure across one of Portugal's most economically dynamic regions. Famalicão itself, with roughly 130,000 inhabitants, is the industrial centre of the Ave Valley — home to major textile, manufacturing, and logistics operations that generate significant parking demand in compact historic centres never designed for modern traffic volumes.

Northern Portugal's mid-sized cities — Famalicão, Barcelos, Esposende, Guimarães — share this challenge: growing commuter traffic from Porto's expanding economy, limited parking infrastructure, and municipalities that increasingly coordinate on shared infrastructure. Multiconnect's role has been to deploy a consistent smart parking sensor network across several of these municipalities at once, feeding data into its own CWAY analytics platform. That mandate is what has driven five documented Fleximodo orders since December 2023 — a relationship that started with the largest single order in Fleximodo's history and, more than two years later, evolved into a completely different connectivity technology.

Phase 1 (2023-2024): NB-IoT Rollout and Rapid Scale

Order 1 — 31 December 2023: Fleximodo's Largest Single Order

Multiconnect's opening order was not a pilot or a trial — it was, by sensor count, Fleximodo's largest single deployment globally at the time. The order comprised an estimated 684 IoT Parking Sensor Standard units (NB-IoT, in-ground), each with a 1-year warranty, shipped to Portugal under insured bulk freight. That sensor count — confirmed by Fleximodo's own CWAY Portugal deployment listing — represents enough in-ground parking sensors to equip roughly 15-20 municipal parking zones spread across multiple northern Portuguese cities.

The order was pure hardware procurement: no IoT Hub, no managed backend, no bundled connectivity SIMs. That told Fleximodo from day one that Multiconnect intended to run its own CWAY data-processing platform rather than Fleximodo's CityPortal dashboard — treating the NB-IoT parking sensors purely as detection hardware feeding a proprietary smart city application layer, while retaining full control over data routing and the municipal-facing interface.

NB-IoT was the obvious connectivity choice for a rollout spanning several municipalities at once. Each city sits within Portugal's NOS, Vodafone, or MEO cellular coverage, so sensors connect independently the moment they're installed — no shared gateway infrastructure to plan or manage across dispersed urban locations. For a company of Multiconnect's size deploying across an entire region simultaneously, avoiding LoRaWAN gateway coordination across multiple cities was a significant operational simplification at this stage.

Order 2 — 15 January 2024: A Rapid Follow-Up

Two weeks later, Multiconnect placed a second order: an additional 50-80 IoT Parking Sensor Standard units (NB-IoT, in-ground), matching the exact specification of the December mega-order, again with insured shipping to Portugal. Large rollouts routinely surface coverage gaps once the first wave is installed — zones excluded from the original scope, extra streets requested by a municipality after seeing early results, or new municipal partners joining the programme. The two-week turnaround is itself informative: installation crews were already in the field, the CWAY platform was already ingesting data from the first wave of sensors, and additional zones were being equipped as the rollout progressed in near real time.

Across these two orders alone, Multiconnect had already become one of Fleximodo's largest deployments by sensor count anywhere in the world — a rollout pace that, in raw scale, rivalled far larger cumulative partner relationships, achieved in a fraction of the time.

Phase 2 (2025-2026): The Return Order and the LoRaWAN Pivot

Order 3 — 1 October 2025: A Long-Tail Return-Customer Order

Nearly two years after the initial rollout, Multiconnect placed a further order — internally logged by Fleximodo as the client's fourth order overall — for IoT Parking Sensor Standard (NB-IoT, in-ground) hardware paired with a notable connectivity detail: a 10-year Vodafone NB-IoT SIM with an explicit 750 MB data allocation, rather than the higher-ceiling or unlimited-style plans typical of Fleximodo's Deutsche Telekom-based connectivity option.

The 750 MB figure is deliberately sized, not arbitrary: spread over 10 years it works out to roughly 75 MB per year, or about 205 KB per day per sensor. For compressed NB-IoT telemetry with typical payload sizes of 20-50 bytes per message, that comfortably covers thousands of occupancy-change reports, keepalives, and diagnostic messages per day, with headroom left for DOTA firmware updates. A defined-allocation SIM plan like this gives both customer and carrier pricing predictability that an unlimited plan doesn't — a sensible fit for a sensor whose data volume is inherently small and predictable.

Vodafone's continued role here is consistent with the wider pattern among Fleximodo's Portuguese integrators: Vodafone is a leading NB-IoT operator in Portugal with strong domestic coverage, and Fleximodo supports it — including private APN configurations where an integrator's architecture calls for one — alongside its default Deutsche Telekom connectivity profile used in Deutsche Telekom subsidiary markets such as Germany, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, and Slovakia.

At nearly two years into an established deployment, a modest order like this typically reflects one of a handful of operational realities: marginal expansion into a few additional parking spaces, replacement stock for sensors damaged by vehicle impact or construction work, a new small end-customer deployment, or simple spare-stock provisioning ahead of anticipated maintenance needs. The source records don't specify which applied here — but the pattern itself, a well-established deployment still generating incremental procurement nearly two years on, is itself the signal: it demonstrates a customer relationship that has moved successfully from rollout into long-term operational mode.

Order 4 — 4 February 2026: The Pivot to LoRaWAN

This order marks the most distinctive turn in Multiconnect's history with Fleximodo: after a run of NB-IoT-only orders, Multiconnect placed its first-ever LoRaWAN order — IoT Parking Sensor Standard (LoRaWAN, in-ground) units, with a 1-year warranty and, notably, backend and monitoring included via Fleximodo's CityPortal, shipped with insurance under HS Code 90330090.

The backend-included detail is significant precisely because it's new: Multiconnect's earlier NB-IoT orders had bundled Vodafone connectivity but generally left data processing to Multiconnect's own CWAY platform. This LoRaWAN order instead brings the sensors onto Fleximodo's managed CityPortal backend — meaning the LoRaWAN fleet and the existing NB-IoT fleet can, for the first time, be viewed and managed from a single unified platform rather than two entirely separate systems.

A pivot from NB-IoT to LoRaWAN after several consecutive cellular orders implies that Multiconnect either built or gained access to LoRaWAN gateway infrastructure it didn't have — or didn't need — during the initial regional rollout. Where NB-IoT suits sensors spread across dispersed municipalities relying on existing cellular coverage, a LoRaWAN parking sensor becomes commercially or technically preferable in different contexts: indoor parking structures, concentrated car parks, or sites where a private LoRaWAN gateway network offers denser coverage or a better long-term cost profile than ongoing per-SIM cellular connectivity. The source material doesn't state Multiconnect's specific reason for switching, but this is the general trade-off that drives NB-IoT-to-LoRaWAN pivots in smart parking: NB-IoT minimizes upfront infrastructure across dispersed sites, while LoRaWAN can lower the long-run cost of ownership and improve indoor/concentrated-site coverage once gateway infrastructure is in place.

Technically, the pivot changes nothing about detection performance. The sensor's 99.96% accuracy comes from its dual detection technology — a magnetometer combined with radar — and from automatic temperature compensation, which is protocol-independent. Automatic temperature compensation is firmware logic that continuously recalibrates a magnetometer parking sensor's baseline reading as ground and ambient temperature shift through the seasons; without it, magnetic-field drift caused by heat or cold can produce false vacant/occupied readings. Whether a given sensor reports over NB-IoT or LoRaWAN, this compensation is what keeps detection accuracy consistent year-round.

Order 5 — 9 March 2026: The LoRaWAN Top-Up

Just 33 days after the LoRaWAN pivot order, Multiconnect placed a further order for additional LoRaWAN Sensor Standard (in-ground) units, again with backend included and HS Code 90330090 — its smallest order to date. Small top-up orders placed shortly after a larger deployment typically fill gaps discovered during field installation: parking spaces missed in the original sensor plan, additional units needed for accurate zone counting or entrance/exit detection, or coverage added after the site layout changed post-order.

The significance of this order isn't its size — it's what it confirms. A second consecutive LoRaWAN order, arriving as a field top-up rather than a fresh pilot, confirms that Multiconnect's LoRaWAN gateway infrastructure is live and functioning, and that the pivot from NB-IoT is operational rather than experimental. Multiconnect now runs what amounts to a dual-protocol fleet: NB-IoT parking sensors with Vodafone Portuguese connectivity for the original dispersed-municipality rollout, and LoRaWAN parking sensors with Fleximodo CityPortal backend for newer, more concentrated deployment sites — a combination that lets a single Portuguese integrator match connectivity type to deployment context rather than committing to one protocol across every site.

Order Timeline

Order #	Date	Products / What Changed	Significance
Order 1	31 December 2023	~684 IoT Parking Sensor Standard units (NB-IoT, in-ground)	Largest single Fleximodo order to date; launched the multi-municipality CWAY rollout
Order 2	15 January 2024	~50-80 additional NB-IoT Sensor Standard units	Rapid follow-up order two weeks later, closing coverage gaps from the initial rollout
Order 3	1 October 2025	NB-IoT Sensor Standard + 10-year Vodafone SIM (750 MB data allocation)	Return-customer order nearly two years into the deployment; introduces a defined-allocation connectivity plan
Order 4	4 February 2026	LoRaWAN Sensor Standard (in-ground), backend/CityPortal included	Pivot to LoRaWAN — Multiconnect's first-ever LoRaWAN order after a run of NB-IoT-only orders
Order 5	9 March 2026	LoRaWAN Sensor Standard top-up, backend included	Confirms the pivot is operational; smallest order to date, fine-tuning the live LoRaWAN deployment

Note: Fleximodo's internal deployment records reference this client's orders using a higher running count — the October 2025 order is logged internally as the client's "fourth order" and the two LoRaWAN orders as the "fifth" and "sixth." This implies at least one additional Multiconnect order (likely between January 2024 and October 2025) exists in Fleximodo's records but is not covered by a dedicated source article, and is therefore not included as a separate row above.

Technical Profile: NB-IoT Sensor Standard (In-Ground)

Specification	Detail
Detection method	3-axis magnetic field + nanoradar (dual detection technology)
Detection accuracy	99.96%
Dimensions	115 mm diameter, height 64 mm
Weight	390 g
Battery	3.6 V, 13-19 Ah (6-year operational lifetime); 10-year battery life across the wider Fleximodo sensor range
Connectivity	NB-IoT — Vodafone (Portugal), 10-year bundled SIM options including a 750 MB defined-allocation plan
Ingress protection	IP68
Impact resistance	IK10
Weight endurance	Up to 8 tonnes
Operating temperature	-40 to +85 °C
Casing	Ultrasonically welded into one piece
Certifications	ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, DNV, CE, FCC
Warranty	1 year standard

Technical Profile: LoRaWAN Sensor Standard (In-Ground)

Specification	Detail
Detection method	3-axis magnetic field + nanoradar (dual detection technology)
Detection accuracy	99.96%
Dimensions	115 mm diameter, height 64 mm
Weight	390 g
Battery lifetime	6 years operational (10-year battery life across the wider Fleximodo sensor range)
Ingress protection	IP68
Impact resistance	IK10
Connectivity	LoRaWAN parking sensor — protocol pivot from this client's earlier NB-IoT orders
Backend	Backend and monitoring included via Fleximodo CityPortal
HS Code	90330090
Warranty	1 year standard

Across both connectivity variants, the 99.96% detection accuracy rating holds because it derives from the sensor's magnetometer-plus-radar dual detection technology combined with automatic temperature compensation — not from the choice of NB-IoT parking sensor or LoRaWAN parking sensor connectivity. That consistency is what let Multiconnect pivot protocols in 2026 without any change in expected occupancy detection performance across its Portuguese sites.

Fleximodo smart parking technology is deployed in 50+ countries. View all products | S O NAH — German large-scale NB-IoT deployment | multiGuide — Fleximodo's largest cumulative partner | DATAREDE — Madeira Vodafone NB-IoT deployment