The Hidden Cost of the « Internet of Pipes

The Hidden Cost of the « Internet of Pipes »
Beneath our streets, a quiet revolution is going wrong. The push to digitize aging water, gas, and sewage systems by embedding cheap wireless sensors—creating an « Internet of Pipes »—is having an unintended consequence: a digital divide for critical infrastructure. Wealthier municipalities with modern pipes are deploying advanced, integrated systems for leak detection and predictive maintenance. Meanwhile, smaller towns and cash-strapped cities are retrofitting crumbling networks with a patchwork of low-cost, proprietary sensors from various startups. These devices often fail within 18 months, spew incoherent data, and can’t communicate with each other or public works software, creating data graveyards. The result isn’t smarter infrastructure, but a new layer of costly, dysfunctional tech obscuring the same old physical decay. This scramble for « smart » solutions is leaving disadvantaged communities with more debt and less actionable data, potentially worsening the infrastructure equity gap for decades.