Le résumé
Malaysia’s outdoor air quality monitoring infrastructure has historically relied on a small number of widely spaced government stations, enough to report a national index, but not enough to show what’s actually happening at street level, near schools, or along busy urban corridors. The gap between national averages and local exposure is significant, and it’s exactly where urban planning decisions need the most precision.
EDOTCO Group, the regional telecommunications infrastructure company managing over 47,000 towers across Asia, launched SETARA to turn their massive network of tower infrastructure into something more than connectivity. The idea: use EDOTCO’s physical network as the backbone for environmental sensing, creating a shared data layer that gives city planners the localised information they’ve never had.
Airscan was brought in to design, deploy, and govern the outdoor air quality monitoring system, selecting the parameters, placing the sensors, managing data integrity, and delivering the environmental analysis that makes the raw numbers useful.
Ce que nous avons fait
The first SETARA deployment placed a network of outdoor air quality monitors across Kuala Lumpur’s city centre, with DBKL, KL’s city hall, as a direct stakeholder. The network is designed to answer a specific set of questions: how do traffic patterns, speed zones, and land use affect air quality across the capital, and where do concentrations vary most across short distances?
The sensor placement creates enough spatial density to resolve pollutant behaviour at fine resolution, capturing how concentrations shift between a busy intersection and a pedestrian zone, or upwind and downwind of a major road. That level of detail gives city planners the data to evaluate interventions like Low Emission Zones, pedestrianisation, and traffic restrictions through measurable before-and-after comparisons.
Comment ça marche
The sensors measure PM1, PM2.5, PM10, SO2, CO, O3 and NO2 continuously, capturing hourly readings that track daily cycles, seasonal variation, and event-driven spikes. The system runs on EDOTCO’s existing tower infrastructure, which provides power, connectivity, and physical mounting points.
Airscan manages the full monitoring lifecycle: sensor calibration, data quality assurance, and environmental analysis. Raw readings are cross-referenced with meteorological conditions (wind direction, speed, humidity, temperature) to identify which patterns originate from pollution sources and which are weather-driven. In a tropical climate with distinct wet and dry seasons, monsoon winds, and periodic haze events, this contextual layer is essential to producing analysis that city planners can act on.
The data is accessible in real time through web and mobile platforms, giving both government stakeholders and the public visibility into local air quality conditions.
Résultats
While still in its pilot phase, the SETARA monitoring network in Kuala Lumpur is active and delivering capabilities that didn’t previously exist at this resolution.
DBKL now has continuous, localised air quality measurement in specific city hotspots, a baseline against which any planning intervention can be evaluated. If the city implements their planned Low Emission Zones or restricts vehicle access on a corridor, the monitoring network shows whether pollutant concentrations actually changed, and by how much. That before-and-after measurement capability gives urban planning decisions an evidence base they’ve lacked until now.
The pilot also serves as a proof of concept for scaling the model across EDOTCO’s tower network nationwide. The infrastructure to expand to over a thousand monitoring nodes, with towers, power, and connectivity already in place, means the physical backbone exists. The implementation, management, sensing and analysis intelligence layer is what Airscan adds.
What SETARA gives Kuala Lumpur, for the first time at this resolution, is the ability to understand air pollution as it actually behaves in specific places, measured continuously where people live, work, and send their children to school.
If you’re a city authority, municipal planner, or infrastructure operator exploring environmental monitoring for your area, visit Airscan’s Surveillance de la qualité de l'air extérieur page to learn more and get in touch.
