Hi all I was thinking that universities should be quite an easy sell; Spend £400 on this and your students can do innovative stuff.
Beyond that if you could get a few to deploy (Say target Oxford/ Cambridge first in the UK) then all of the other lower ranking places might put up a node to 'be in the club'.
If we could achieve reasonable levels of University buy in, then at that stage you could start to target secondary schools. The sell would be; All the Universities have installed this. Here's our educational pack with 40 LoRa enabled Pi's, plus a gateway for you to use with the 6th form, We could then get the Schools to ask the parents for a crowdfund contribution to it.
There are many schools, lots within 7miles of each other
Once Schools in the first world are covered you have a pretty ubiquitous network. You could then leverage that crowdfunding network to extend the network to schools in the global South too.
That came out slightly incoherently, but hopefully it makes some sense.
Thanks
Sam